Growing pains: preparing for gravitational-wave astronomy at scale

In the six years since the first detection of gravitational waves, the number of observed gravitational-wave transient signals has increased to nearly 100. This expanding population has enabled many new insights ranging from stellar astrophysics to cosmology and strong-field tests of general relativity. Most of these measurements rely on combining information from the entire catalog of mergers to constrain the underlying physics. However, the methods used suffer from a range of computational issues and are not suited to analyzing large numbers of events. Further, with the current catalog of events, we cannot resolve narrow features in the population models due to failures of our analysis methods. In this talk, I will provide an example of how new techniques can help us to probe extreme distributions of black hole spins.