Hi Deborah,
For the pre-processing issue, moving to have the toolkit change the pre-processing flow is the best suggestion.
I will work on updating the language in the proposal around toolkit requirements and the setting rules on recursive conref processing (chain issue).
The ability for a user to select "all children" of an element for conreffing purposes is a new use case and a specific problem area that 12013 was not intended to solve.
Now that it is on the table and as there are multiple conref proposals on the table for 1.2 (12013, 12014, 12015), my suggestion is that this particular use case might be best expressed as a new proposal number, or forked off as 12013B and then go through the standard process to validate that we want to solve this in DITA 1.2 and then come up with a solution design.
In terms of generalization, adding the assumption that generalization processing will be the same as standard element processing during a conref ( text nodes would be the exception) is implied by the fact that this range markup is only meant to provide a short hand:
Source Document A
