i'm building this now. it is going to be lightning fast, and use an allowed exception in NIP-01 that specifies underscore prefixed fields are to be ignored. it will let you grab even the list of metadata events, all sorted and grouped, either by depth of distance the users first appear from a "seed" npub, or multiple criteria like reactions/reposts, reports and mutes, and it will allow you to also do queries that fetch whole threads using index free adjacency with vertex graphs. it's all very clear in my mind, clear enough that i am confident i will have a working version within a few hours. i'm also adding a standard nip-01 based graph traversal for 3 degree follow graphs to the benchmark, as a baseline to compare both the optimization of relays to doing this kind of query under the existing scheme, and later i will make it add, for comparison, if the relay supports the new _graph field in REQ, to show how much faster again that 3 degree pubkey list can be produced using graph vertexes. i'm pretty sure it's gonna be at least one if not two extra decimal places in the ratio to nip-01