Merge Points has been an absolute lifesaver given some of the topological nightmares we inherited from former staff. What looks like a single point is often upwards of 4, and a lot of the alignment tools fail to work because of it. Merging the points and aligning / removing boundary features with this tool is fantastic!
Except, I noticed one little thing: the affected features don't get their "Last Updated" timestamp updated. Here's an area where previously, the parcels had been clipped by a NHD river polygon. When our parcels were converted to the Parcel Fabric data model, literally hundreds of short segments were added to the boundary lines layer, with fabric point features between each.
Legally speaking, these river frontages have a single distance and no bearing, so they were perfect candidates for using the Merge Points tool. I can go back and add vertices to make them look "nice" with the river's edge, but now each is represented by a single line feature, and is in keeping with the recorded documents and plats.
This area has a subdivision, dozens of parcels and lots, as well as historic features. Despite all of them drastically changing their shape along the river's edge, not a single one of them had their "last modified" field updated.
Without visually scanning the area and being familiar with the "before" picture, or looking at a historic point in time in the database, there is literally no indication that this area was edited. In my rather small department, this isn't much of an issue internally, but I can imagine scenarios when you'd want to keep track of where and what edits are being made.
Also, we have a few hosted layers in our Portal that rely on the features in our parcel fabric to align properly. A script handles the updates in these cases, but the script relies on querying the parcel fabric service for things that were edited since the last run of the script, using the "last modified" field. So in those situations, the updates aren't cascading down to the other layers, due to this field not being updated by the tool.
