Glamour and why it's poorly designed

[Callinon]

It's more than possible to store a list of simple 0 and 1 bits in a form much smaller than the number of items in that list. A simple 8-bit binary number can store a list of up to 256 0s and 1s for example.

Well no... an 8-bit number can store exactly 8 zeroes and ones. Doing it with bitvectors is probably still a better use of memory, but now we're getting into interpolation, encoding, and maintenance of a complex array of thousands of items.