you sir, have restored hope in this plugin.
Now, I'll wait to see it.
On a side note.... when dev of this happens, one issue with the previous "preview", there was a nasty amount of nodes that were created by maya or the plugin. It took an unnecessary amount of time to strip the nodes out. I suppose however, this may already be remedied by the "expand/collapse" items. Furthermore, It used to create an object node for every object in the scene.... my scenes have between 200-800 objects (fully detailed electronics). This creates a massive mess and is very unusable. there should be the option to translate as alembic nodes.
The best way I can explain this is our current process. For each major assembly, we export an alembic file. so if there are 3 major assemblies (monitor, desktop, keyboard for example) it would be 3 nodes. we connect them to a geometry group node and then to the render target. The alembic nodes are grouped to keep things tidy. The camera is exported as it's own node for easy updating without worrying about the rest of the geometry. This helps to keep things very organized and when a specific part of an assembly is updated, we are only having to be concerned about that group being exported.
another side note regarding expand/collapse, I just tried it with a material node... when i hit collapse... the entire node evaporated. bug?