[fuwafuwa]

Well, of course ECS does that. It's ultimately the same approach to data as a normalized relational schema. It's a bit of upfront work but the flexibility of processing and optimization is awesome.

For UI the issue is one of expressing lightweight dependencies, which may be detached and recombined easily. I am currently exploring an approach that combines "imgui" concepts with hierarchical path data, akin to the hard and symbolic links in Unix. Having the path as data allows assemblages of partial routes to be combined to express a "final" data point. The data itself may not entirely exist in a physical tree structure but instead be a combination of procedural data, stored data, and a parser.

[nikki93]

The extreme version of an ECS is an EAV: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity–attribute–value_model

When you further qualify by time/transaction you get EAVT like Datomic and then just do queries (potentially recursive), and can implement semantics like "classes" over it.