Yes that was possible and I may even have some SO posts/examples floating around explaining how.

Given that this was before the move to the Path/Container business, it doesn't seem like such a big deal to phase out, especially for this library.

I don't think there ever was support for message fields in `query_method` thought I don't recall off the top of my head what the support was in `method`. I'd guess the support was bootstrapped off what was in the SDK.