Thanks for your feedback, Forrest. We can appreciate you wanting to know as much as possible about Quick Base. In this case, there isn't so much a cut and dry answer to an alternative. In fact, we aren't even saying a builder shouldn't take the above approach. Many factors come into play.
For example, the number of records, the rest of the complexity of the app, etc. We want to help our builders understand best practices as well as some inner workings and potential trade-offs of certain features or implementations. A potential workaround here could be a direct relationship to a table further down the chain (rather than multi-level lookups) or even passing certain data via Automations. When those scenarios arise, we would be happy to help evaluate and suggest best practices.
We are still exploring the best ways to share more technical information and what the appetite is among our builders - so it is good to know there is more interest.