Turns out I was able to easily avoid the potential upload loops that would occur if each time a repo receives a download, it queues uploads to the repos it's connected to. With that done. I suspect, but have not proven, that the assistant is able to keep repos arranged in any shape of graph in sync, as long as it's connected (of course) and each connection is bi-directional. That's a good start .. or at least a nice improvement from only strongly connected graphs being kept in sync.
Eliminated some empty commits that would be made sometimes, which is a nice optimisation.
I wanted to get back to some UI work after this week's deep dive into the internals. So I filled in a missing piece, the repository switcher in the upper right corner. Now the webapp's UI allows setting up different repositories for different purposes, and switching between them.