Hey @kinderjoypresents, thanks for the PR and your others! Before we consider merging, could you share a concrete scenario where you hit this bug? The current behavior has been stable, and while I understand the docs/implementation mismatch you're pointing out, the heuristic-based detection (looksLikeHeaders) adds complexity that could introduce subtle bugs of its own.

If there's a real use case driving this, I'd prefer a simpler solution - either properly typing the options interface or just being explicit that the parameter only accepts headers. Let me know what problem you were trying to solve and we can discuss the right approach.

Hey @kinderjoypresents, thanks for the PR and your others! Before we consider merging, could you share a concrete scenario where you hit this bug? The current behavior has been stable, and while I understand the docs/implementation mismatch you're pointing out, the heuristic-based detection (looksLikeHeaders) adds complexity that could introduce subtle bugs of its own.

If there's a real use case driving this, I'd prefer a simpler solution - either properly typing the options interface or just being explicit that the parameter only accepts headers. Let me know what problem you were trying to solve and we can discuss the right approach.

Hey, thanks for the thoughtful feedback.

A concrete scenario where I hit this: I needed to pass request-level options to the underlying fetch/HTTP layer (not headers). For example:

• Abort/timeout control via signal (AbortController) to avoid requests hanging indefinitely (common in CI, server-side batch scripts, or when OpenSea’s API is slow/intermittent).
• Custom agent / proxy settings in Node (e.g. corporate proxy, keep-alive agent), which are also request options.

Thanks for explaining the use case! That makes sense - timeout/abort control and custom agents are legitimate request-level concerns.

I've opened #1871 which adds a proper typed RequestOptions interface:

  await api.post('/path', body, headers, {
    timeout: 5000,           // timeout in ms
    signal: controller.signal // AbortController support
  });

This addresses your timeout/abort use case with explicit typing instead of heuristics. The interface is also exported so SDK consumers can use it.

For custom agent/proxy settings - those would need additional work since ethers.FetchRequest doesn't directly expose that. If that's important for your use case, let me know and we can explore options (might require a different approach like allowing a custom fetch implementation, but would prefer to stick to ethers for simplicity and relying on battle tested library than rolling our own).