If you live anywhere with public water, you know that it's not delivered through the second-story window in your house - it's underground. There are many reasons for this, but mostly it's to get the utility to you without cluttering up your pretty landscaping and messing up your property values.

What if Pipeline Pilot had something like that? What would it be useful for?

My "aboveground" plumbing is for all my protocol logic and the "public" data flow. But for data that I generate now and need later, I need to put it in global properties, or caches, and then retrieve it. A good example is when one is collecting errors (or failures) from multiple points in a protocol and want to report those out in a single location (e.g. a table). Currently one has to write out multiple caches, read them in later, and report them out. Wouldn't it be great if I could "underground pipe" connect my fail ports together to my error components, without having all sorts of spaghetti all over my protocols, to move the data where it needs to go without needing to write all these caches!