Hey AllanHeoFNM , thanks for engaging on this!
To answer your question on the goal: the driver is a practical support workflow. When a user stops receiving emails and contacts our customer support team, the agent needs to quickly determine whether that user is spam-blocked or hard bounced, and resolve it without pulling in a developer.
Hard bounces are actually straightforward. Braze provides an API for that, so querying and removing users from the bounce list is simple enough. The real pain point is spam status, which is what prompted me to post here. There's no equivalent current-state API, which forces us down the Currents path with all the complexity I outlined above.
I did raise a support ticket with Braze, but the response was essentially that there's no better native solution beyond what we're already working with i.e., raw event streams via Currents.
I posted here specifically hoping someone in the community has found a cleaner approach to this, whether that's a pattern we haven't considered, a workaround. Would love to hear how others are tackling it.