Consider how we interact with dictionaries

[espenfl]

Typically, we do dict_node.get_dict() and operate on it from there.

There are simplifications to this:

• if we only want to check one key, we could use dict_node.somekey directly, but would get a db hit for each such request

• AttributeDict could be returned as default using get_dict (we use AttributeDict extensively and this would make the core look more uniform and easier to read/diagnose)

Locate places in the code where the first point can be applied.