When I did those tests, I was actually minding clutter not size, as in "the less clutter, the less delay in processing metadata changes", as
ownedbycats speculated.
But it seems chaley was right in his reply, as I have all functioning well and fast at the moment.
(I had experienced some delay in metadata processing recently, regarding author notes, but after deleting my author Bio column and recreating it, issue was gone)