Its not a huge site and its will have a finite number of users (Nothing more than few hundred), so making everyone friends shouldn't be too much of an issue, but duly noted. The idea is that it is a trusted site and everyone on the site is a "friend" to each other. Thanks for feedback! 

IMO, friendships are redundant if everybody is a friend anyway. Just update the access subqueries and a few areas where friends are assumed and you will be better off. I don't think it makes sense wasting cycles making everyone friends.

@ Slen Dot Net , Welcome home from Oxwall land. Here in the community you can search for community plugins and look for plugins that can accomplish your goal and if you can not find one, then with the help of the community you can seek for help and then try and keep your hands dirty "try coding" in order to learn how Elgg works. After a few months you should be ready to fly in the world of Elgg engine language.

Back to your question, I think Ismayil Khayredinov , has explained it better why you might not want to make all your users friends. The more friends you have the longer it will take for most of your user's pages to load and even the your data query will go nuts due to constant bombardments when most of your users are active on your site.