I agree we want to be able to archive DoM files, probably for backup purposes and for consistency, but it won't really save much space if they are released since the inode currently still needs to be kept on the MDT. For archiving many small files, and trees of directories with HSM stub inodes, I think it would make the most sense to archive the files via an ldiskfs filesystem image, which is more efficient for both the Lustre and archive. Upon access, the filesystem image could be restored from the archive to an OST object in one shot, and mounted internally on the MDT via osd-ldiskfs and directly exported to clients, rather than having thousands of archive restore actions.
On the restore side, it doesn't really make sense to restore a large PFL file with a DoM first component vs. dropping the DoM component and just extending the first OST component to start at offset zero. For that matter, restoring any file should potentially drop the first component(s) and use the layout of the last instantiated component to determine the stripe count/size, since a PFL layout is most useful when the file size is not known in advance.
Landed for 2.11