in pretty much every case, these usages really wanted to read the tag's contents anyway, which can be combined with a getTag() and instanceof call for more concise and static analysis friendly code.
In the few cases where the tag contents wasn't needed, it still wanted to check the type, which, again, can be done in a more static analysis friendly way by just using getTag() and instanceof.
this reduces the temptation to use it in high-level code, as well as making syncNetworkData() more useful (now it can export to many data collections, which means we can start to think about having a property cache per network session, which is more flexible)
