Other types of custom fields (such as "regular custom field") support bulk updates, but this type does not.
Additionally, the "initiatives" field supports bulk updates (which is what the record relationship fields seem similar to.)
Not being able to update in bulk means that we have to update the features one-by-one (which is relatively painful.) Additionally, the reason we were wanting to use a custom record field was so that we could more easily cross product streams.
voting for this i am.