Maybe this is why my client is taking so long to load at the moment. At first I thought it was my update to ossl 100f, but after checking 100e again, it's not. Tor currently sits in the netstatus consensus and missing dir auth phases for indefinite tens of minutes before coming online.
valid-until 2012-01-09 20:00:00 Mon Jan 9 22:..:.. UTC 2012
Is this something that's distributable as a piecemeal flood into the net as each router is validated. Some sort of client held table so the scale work and partitioning is done there with their cpu/disk.