If I'm reading their post-outage actions correctly, they certainly align with availability > durability.

There are many things to like about DynamoDB, but one of the things I really dislike is the 'abscence of an error == success' pattern that they implement for many operations. With less frequent metadata requests, I imagine there is a greater chance of silent failures (ie availability looks fine, durability is gone).

Could be wrong though, I'm not going to pretend to know more about distributed systems than the DynamoDB developers.