handle two special cases

handle two special cases

1) when all nodes write the same value to the record, or when writing
   a value that is already there, we can skip the write and save
   ourselves a network transactions

2) when all remote nodes fail an update, and we then fail a replay, we
   don't need to trigger a recovery. This solves a corner case where
   we could get into a recovery loop
(This used to be commit 2481bfce4307274806584b0d8e295cc7f638e184)