Relationships

That’s a solid way to think about keeping relationships clean and avoiding shortcuts, especially the idea of not skipping levels and letting lookups and summaries flow through the hierarchy.The only nuance is that it’s not strictly “one correct way” in all cases; it’s more of a best-practice pattern for scalability and maintainability. In most well-structured apps, yes: You avoid jumping directly from grandparent → grandchild You propagate data step-by-step using lookups You roll data upward using summary fields at each relationship level But there are edge cases where additional relationships or alternative modeling (like junction tables or direct relationships) are actually appropriate, especially for performance, reporting flexibility, or many-to-many structures. Reverse relationships are also sometimes needed to access downstream data efficiently. So I’d frame it less as a rule, and more as: Default to step-by-step hierarchy unless there’s a clear reason to introduce a direct relationship.

There is only one correct answer here. The right way to do it in Quick Base is to walk the lookups  down one look up at a time and walk the summary fields up one relationship at a time. You never skip a level.  So if you were summarizing total sales, then you make a summary field between the grand child and the parent, and then on the relationship between the grandparent and the parent you summarize the summary field. 

You never try to add extra relationships directly from the grandparent to the grandchild.  That just complicates your app and also you will not be able to create any summary fields if you use that method.