Both aren't a particular good idea as we always want to be faster & not
waste memory so constraint [virtual or real] machines continue to work.
So that seems "very difficult to fix due to major design considerations"
(if you read on you might notice why I use that quote).
Is there an alternative to apt that can use the same package repos, but process them in a fault-tolerant manner (e.g. load the merged-so-far list, try to merge the next source, save if successful, repeat)? If so, I'll want to switch to that, even if it means only having support for 10-year-old instead of 20-year-old hardware. I thought fault-tolerance and graceful degradation were important enough to the design of Debian that that would be a hard requirement.