The moment I come across a clean and elegant way to display the tree, I’m sure I’ll post about it.

In the meantime, with my current project I’ve moved away from a design involving displaying multiple levels/branches of a hierarchy all at once. I may revisit that concept, though right now I’m feeling good about the decision to start with everything collapsed and fetch a single level when an item is expanded.

I suppose I won’t know whether it’s truly more responsive to load an entire tree up front until I do some testing; both methods have trade-offs but the one-level-at-a-time display is simpler to implement.