Serialization of hierarchies: async=true "down" and async=false "up"

I have an app with a lot of hierarchies of data.

For example, Company belongsTo IndustryGroup belongsTo IndustrySector and, Bookmark belongsTo Category. The primary model, Thing has a many-to-many relationship with both Company and Bookmark. So, view might display a Thing and the three related Companies and the four user-selected Bookmarks.

So my models in Ember look like the following to avoid the circular dependencies from my server-side serialization:

// Category
export default DS.Model.extend({
  bookmarks: DS.hasMany('bookmark', { async: true })
});

// Bookmark
export default DS.Model.extend({
  category: DS.belongsTo('category', { async: false }), // sideloaded from server JSON
  things: DS.belongsTo('thing', { async: true })
});

// Thing
export default DS.Model.extend({
  // fully sideloaded
  bookmarks: DS.hasMany('bookmark', { async: false }), 

  // fully sideloaded so industry groups and sectors get loaded as well
  companies: DS.hasMany('company', { async: false }) 
});

So, as a general question, is this a good or bad design? It seems to work most of the time for a “Thing-centric” application, but I’ve have run into various problems for views that display the top levels of the hierarchies (e.g. showing all the Companies that are available from an IndustryGroup).