True. This is partly a result of development on the R client side when the links to observations/highdim were not yet available. Currently, is suits the needs of the end-user by making the link reference to a concept (whether clinical or highdim) consistent (you always need the concept self link). But I agree that a necessary future improvement would be to "forbid" any link construction and always make use of retrieved links. This is not possible yet (for instance, we are missing a link on how to retrieve concepts for a study, which must be constructed client side for now).