For what it's worth, I came to the same conclusion (that desired shouldn't be a separately stored thing, and only serves to confuse us whenever storing things in Cassandra goes horribly wrong), but that's for the queue-based redesign; that doesn't mean we can get rid of it right now :-)

(Perhaps this is something that would be resolved with the queue syncup meeting thingy I'm planning; but that should probably only follow after I send out the current suggestion document to the list.)