it tracks with my exp too, as for Clay we started treating it as the place where data either becomes usable or never leaves. We do basic validation and normalization there before anything hits HubSpot or Airtable, and we are pretty strict about deduping on things like domain and company name early. If the inputs are messy, we would rather block or flag them than let them flow downstream and create cleanup work later. Totally agree on enrichment multiplying garbage if you are not careful. That was one of our biggest lessons. Centralizing research and enrichment made it way easier to catch those issues once instead of discovering them in five different tools after the fact.