I know I'm coming late to this, but I would like us to rethink having statistics dumped by default. I was caught by this today, as I was doing two dumps in a row, but the output changed between runs solely because the stats got updated. It got me thinking about all the use cases of pg_dump I've seen over the years. I think this has the potential to cause a lot of problems for things like automated scripts. It certainly violates the principle of least astonishment to have dumps change when no user interaction has happened.
Alternatively, we could put stats into SECTION_POST_DATA,
No, that would make the above-mentioned problem much worse.
