There is a suspicion that the integration layer of the node might be invoking computations that are proportional to the type-level lists (TLL) that are used in the hard-fork combinator (HFC).
We need to define a custom Cardano-like era that can be run with our system-level benchmarks so that we can compare its performance with that of the Cardano node.
If there is a cost introduced by the HFC then we want to exaggerate its impact, hence the preference for a long TLL.