It's vestigial; I originally thought that use of `q` exclude use of attribute comparators. While it inherits RestQuery and extends its template so it shouldn't break anything, a conditional for checking the existence of `q` has to go somewhere in order to preprocess the query object (https://github.com/xtuple/xtuple/blob/df7563906b7a8bcd91e29eb4e36f818c1f439496/node-datasource/lib/query/freetext_query.js#L40), and I'm happy to move that conditional logic out of application logic (the express route) and into framework logic (**lib/**query).