You don’t need to know what they will request, you know what they did request. The dataloader thing is a kludge because you never know where you’ll have to go to get data for a particular part of the tree - maybe it’s another endpoint.

Having said that, I don’t mind the second request model myself. It’s actually pretty clean and when you take the dB roundtrips out of it, the dB will generally do the same work anyway.