The problem with silent is it suppresses the events that we want to fire to notify the view something has changed. The reason I suggested off is because in the past I have found it to be the only way to solve a problem where cascading events that happen after asynchronous responses get tangled up and lost in the backbone relational blocking queue. Turning off events temporarily and calling functions manually seemed to be the only work around. A complete rewrite of backbone relational appeared to be the alternative, and I decided there was no time for a multi month diversion of that sort. I agree If there is a more correct fix that doesn't involve massive rearchitecture, or this problem has been fixed in a more recent version of backbone relational, that would be much better,