Record Count Stays Stable Across Versions — Augmenting Adds Columns, Never Rows

1 dataset = 1 row count. Forever. From ingest through every promote, every augment, every triage. If the user has 96 records, every surface that says a number should say 96. Adding properties + values to records becomes new COLUMNS on those records, not new rows in the store. Discovering 231 rows in the row-store for what the user knows is a 96-record dataset is a symptom — of either ghost data from earlier record sets, version-multiplication of the same 96 records across v3/v4/v5, or a leak in the ingest/promote path. Either way: the user never wants to see a number other than their dataset's record count, and the architecture must reflect that.