Over the years, I've heard a lot of information in favor of or totally against the use of the "Request Campaign" flow step. Some have said that it is the lowest priority and thus can be skipped altogether during times of heavy workload for your instance, and that in general it is also very slow. Others have said the exact opposite, saying that it is actually the highest priority and also one of the fastest ways of executing workflows. Is there someone on Marketo's product team that can definitively say one way or the other regarding if the Request Campaign step is good or bad for building an instance that scales up with higher lead volumes?

When used properly, they are a huge time-saver. A perfect use-case is when several smart campaigns need to reference the same flow steps. Rather than build those flow steps in each smart campaign, build it once and then request that campaign. For example, campaign response alerts. Many of our programs are designed to send out an alert to the campaign manager and/or country marketer upon conversion/success. Since there are many choices within the flow step that send out the alert to the appropriate country marketer, we build these centrally and then request them for whichever program/campaign needs them.Another example is a central campaign for syncing leads to CRM. Rather than include a flow step with 23 or so choices (by country) in every smart campaign where a lead may need to be synced to CRM, build it once and reference it across all the campaigns that need it. Makes it so much easier to maintain as marketers come and go.