That kind of situation was the seed of this improvement. AC plugin has that feature for animations that references the whole scene into a small file that contains only what changes: cameras and physical sky (for time lapses, etc.), this way you get fast exports with smaller file sizes; but that wasn't useful if you had references in the original scene, as they wouldn't show in render. I first asked for one or two extra levels of nesting, but Luis found easy to have a virtually unlimited amount of instances. Currently, we put a limit of 128 levels of nesting, but that can be changed.
And you can also do fractals with this!