As I mentioned in another thread recently Explode via Action Code? my use case involves working with medical literature citations and the concept would likely apply to most other academic disciplines as well.
Merging the notes and then exploding them would lose the context of parent-child relationships. I would love to explode an academic citation into child notes which represent “cited by” references. Then perhaps do that recursively for a few generations depending on the volume of notes that creates.
Yes I understand your point that this can easily get out of hand and overwhelm the capability of Tinderbox by creating huge numbers of notes. But that’s really not a big deal - just backup your tbx file before you do the programmatic explode (something which should be routine practice when testing any new Action code); then if it hangs up, do a Force quit and revert to the backup. No harm in the end.
It seems to me this feature could be of use to lots of users with minimal downside. If it is challenging technically to implement it, then I understand it may not be a priority. But if implementing it is straightforward and the major reason to not do it is simply the risk of overloading Tinderbox, that seems to me to be an easily managed risk with much overriding benefit.