When you wind up back-modifying large-ish bodies of code to work in entirely new ways, you wind up with a lot of areas where the fit isn't wonderful. In this case, the ping scanner was written with the assumption that the entire hierarchy was coming from database, and so therefor every operation could rely on the database ID as it's reference identity (i.e. the ID that is used to look it up). Now, as I eliminate the necessity of having a database involved, that assumption, which laces the entire ping-scanner code-base. Oh well.