Sorry, I should‘ve been clearer - the data in question can be loaded synchronously from Apple API’s, and anything asynchronous would’ve been cached ahead of time. Hence “loading data on the fly”, although a more accurate description would be ”assembling the list data on the fly”. In this case I have been able to find solutions where scroll velocity is preserved.

Very cool idea! I wonder if I can send a small ping to nearby devices indicating that new changes on the model context are available for fetching - I may have noticed that even though server -> device pushes are laggy, imperative fetches seemed to work as long as the record had been persisted in CloudKit - if my understanding is correct then this could be a very simple, if not crude, way of “hurrying” SwiftData along. Will report back once I try it out!