I am sure that Khaled could do this if it genuinely made sense
Well, he said that the current algorithm was not great in some cases, that's where the other algorithm might perform better. Hash table are almost never used with unknown data, you typically associate hardcoded, known strings, to unknown data, but you also typically know the kind of data you're using, that's what you would (typically) use to know what 'flag' to use, no need to pre-analyse.
Your suggestion may not be bad but this thread was mainly about the way items are distributed, which is related to the algorithm, so my suggestion seemed fair.
