okay well now i feel a little dumb lol. So When i clicked on "buckets’ in the couchbase UI i assumed it was taking me to my LongtermStorage bucket, however it was taking me to another buket. That bucket has the same objects, but they actually come from syn gateway which gives it the xattrs attributes.
When i looked at the documents in the correct bucket they did not have xattrs. Turns out we run an eventing script to move that data from one bucket to another, and we do not carry over the xattrs when doing so.
Sorry about that. Glad i learned a bit more about how this all works.