A case for variant symlinks

I have a feeling that it might be possible to devise a way for the "happy case" (no hardlinks in any parent) to be about as fast as the current case. But once hardlinks start appearing, it'll devolve rapidly (a nice DoS right there).

And I feel that even alternative VFS designs are not going to help unless they introduce a full-scale garbage collector. Which might not even be such a bad idea once we switch to non-volatile memory.