What problem are you trying to solve?

Focus on the what and why of the need you have, not the how you'd like it solved.

Having int32 as the smallest integer type means even values which can't go over 127 (as is common with enums) have to take 4 bytes of memory. As document count grows, the extra storage space becomes much more crucial

What would you like to see happen?

Describe the desired outcome or enhancement.

Added support for int8 and int16 will allow for much more efficient storage of smaller numeric values

Why is this important to you or your team?

Explain how the request adds value or solves a business need.

For performance critical applications, such optimization would be a very valuable one. Even with "as little as" 1 million documents, each with a single int32 field that can be stored in an int8, this alone can shrink down the collection size by 3MB. In larger collections and more such fields, this size difference grows multiplicatively.

What steps, if any, are you taking today to manage this problem?

There is currently no way to manage this problem as int32 is the current smallest integer type.