Rules recursion prevention

Background
I'm working on a high priority research project and am being bogged down by this 'feature'. I am using Entity References with Rules to create a tree-like node structure to store experimental data. A 'raw data' node has a list of children 'analysis result' node references. Each 'analysis result' node can have subsequent children 'analysis result' nodes, for iterative analysis.

When submitting analysis data, the user specifies the raw data from which the analysis was derived. Rules then automatically adds a reference from the raw data to the analysis data upon saving the content. However:

The problem
Upon deleting a raw data node, a rule goes ahead and deletes all of its children. However, the children's children are left orphaned, because rules prevents recursion into them, effectively preventing their deletion. Is there any way to circumvent this recursion prevention?

Thanks,
-atlas

(PS: I have looked into using the relations module, but, because it does not yet fully support directional relationships, it will not work for our application.)