Thank you for all the info @michael and @jkuester.
It seems, for now, we’re going to use the purge script to reduce the downwards replicated, including the contacts.
The hope is to make our 3 top level users (DHO, VAP, Team Lead) usable again, as currently they draw too much data which causes their login to fail on the replication step.
Taking into consideration that some of our calculations rely on certain forms being available, it seems like purging reports older than 4 months should be a safe bet.
We’re also planning to use the purge script as a sort of archiving tool, since we have been unable to find such a capability listed within the app documentation itself.
What this means is that each edit form, place and person, will have an additional property called archived. This will also prefix the name property value with “(archived)” to indicate the record status to online users. The purge script will then look out for this property in order to omit the contact record from replication. That’s the goal at least 
.
Ideally these records will be hidden for online users too, perhaps similar to users marked as deceased.
@jkuester would omitting a Indawo also omit the Households, people and reports underneath it?
@michael how exactly would one go about amending the views in order to achieve such a result? Perhaps we can give it a test.