It is widely assumed that the purpose of the Lord was to preserve the Book of Mormon's essential information in the face of the loss of the 116 manuscript pages. While that is clearly a historical reality, it may also be that the purpose contained the importance of the text itself. The small plates of Nephi provide a deeply religious look at life, and some fascinating hints as changing social structure as the small plates wind their way to the end. The only way that these plates could have only been as a stopgap "repair" of the loss of the manuscript pages would have been for them to have been sealed, and then unsealed for this purpose. If they were readily available in the plates we perhaps should have had them anyway, and their value would remain. The doctrines of these plates are sufficiently intrinsically valuable that we might have had them even had we retained the Book of Lehi manuscript.