> The CAP theorem is also irrelevant if your acceptable response time is greater than the time it takes your partitions to sync.
This is really an oversimplification. The more important metric here is the delay between write and read of the same data. Even in that case if when the system write load is unpredictable it will definitely lead to high variance in replication lag. The number of times I had to deal with a race condition for not considering replication lag factor is more than I would like to admit.
What's the difference between choosing an acceptable response time that is greater than the time it takes for your partitions to sync and giving up on availability?
I don't think it makes sense to say that CAP doesn't apply if you don't need consistency, availability, or tolerance to partitions. CAP is entirely about the need to relax at least one of those three to shore up the others.
I mean you just KNOW that while that addition may make sense, some 12 year minded person like me would just start referring to it as the CRAP theorem. And I don’t even dislike the theorem.
At that point you get all 3: consistency,availability, partitioning.
In my opinion it should be the CAPR theorem.