Should we unify the behaviours of depexts installations regarding system database upgrades?

Currently the behaviours of opam-depext regarding system database upgrades (e.g. apt update on Debian) is completely different accross platforms:

On Debian, Alpine, NetBSD, Archlinux, Macports: the installation command does not fetch the packages database
On Gentoo: same, but it matters less as Gentoo is a source package manager and stores all the package tree locally
On Homebrew, RedHat variants (Fedora, CentOS, …), OpenSUSE: the installation command fetches the package database automatically everytime the package manager decides it's been too long.
On FreeBSD and DragonflyBSD(?): the packages database is downloaded every time.
On OpenBSD: untested

It could be interesting to unify all these different behaviours in one way or another. I have no specific opinions about that personally but I'd like to get the discussion going. Here is some pro and cons about unifying in one way or the other:

Make everything download the database every time

Pros: No more Download failed, error 404 on m4.1.4.18-5.tar.gz type failures.
Cons: Slows everything down :cry: (some distributions can be really slow to sync)

Make everything download the database only when it's been too long

Pros: Best of both worlds
Cons: Cons of both world :smile: .. on top of being more complicated to maintain

Make everything not download the database

Pros: Fast and predicable
Cons: More annoying for users of some fast-moving distributions, they have to remember to call opam update --depexts first.

After writing everything down I feel more inclined to the latest with maybe a new opam install -u/--update-depexts for a more streamline way of updating the local database.

ocaml / opam