Replacing .dae files with smaller .scn files results in larger .ipa

Ahead of enabling On Demand Resources, I'm trying to optimize resources within an App that uses SceneKit extensively. I see that if I convert .dae files to .scn, their file sizes reduce, consistently, by approximately half. This is great. However, when I then build an archive, I see that the archive file that results is larger. If I click "Distribute App" and choose "Development", the resulting .ipa file is also larger. This seems odd to me that replacing larger .dae files with smaller .scn files results in larger archives and ipa files. Just curious if anyone has a theory why? I've repeated these results just to confirm them, converting different .dae files to .scn files in batches and building separate archive and ipa files each time. I think this question is interesting not just for its impact on deployment, but on build time as well.