I started doing some re-designing to improve the approach and prepare for signatures/checksums.
I realized somewhere during that process that I wanted to eventually control or even randomize the header order for integrity, organization, or security reasons.
The current approach makes that impractical.
I decided to save the current state so that I can then pivot to a better approach that will accommodate the above needs.
Appropriate todo notes are added to this end.
A lot of the existing payload code will be re-designed, again, as a result of this.