I definitely wasn't clear.
Entities certainly cannot know the future, and therefore should not have
pointers into the future. They certainly should know their predecessors.
The question is whether the entity metadata should include the name and
sequence number of the branch version in which the particular entity was
created.
From a purist perspective, my inclination is that the answer should be "no".
An entity should be pointed *to* by it's originating branch version, but
should not point back to that version.
Unfortunately, this creates problems for diagnostics.
Is my original question now more clear?