Hi Doug, great to see you contributing to Gramps-related stuff again! I think your approach is an interesting alternative, and it’s good that it uses ast and not exec.
At this point I think I should also point out that, when I wrote GQL, I did not take into account the existence of SuperTool, as @kku pointed out in this thread. Am I right in assuming that that tool’s syntax is more similar to yours than to GQL?
(Btw, GQL is more SQLish than Pythonic and I wrote it after using Jira Query Language at work.)