Thanks so much for this.
I don’t really have an issue with using cascade and relying on developers to have a stronger conception of the shape of their graph when defining queries in the near term. A lot of us really need this functionality. I do think intelligently minimizing the node universe by tracking node counts and measuring inverse edges is really important, but it seems to me like more of a feature upgrade than a different approach 
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I also think it’s important to provide some functional filters on a set of connected nodes…things like contains, every, and count/length. For instance, being able to efficiently filter for entities that have at least one connected node with property1 and at least one connected node with property2 is very core to my needs (and blocking at scale).
One question - for layered filter queries that can be handled by DQL today, does the logic stop traversal on ‘dead-end’ paths once a node fails a filter?