Regarding issue #3, collection factories fix the flicker issue. Since there’s a functional difference between factories and proxies, I didn’t go for this solution, but it’s good to know for future reference. I rolled the engine version back to 1.2.168 and it works perfectly with proxies. It was a strange issue for sure. I wonder if anybody else has run into this issue. Regardless, that will be the last time I deal with it. 