I've been thinking about about this, and also taking a closer look at the patches. As usual I've taken the long way around to come to the same conclusions the original author did. For the benefit of future readers I'll probably write a long form comment for inclusion in the code.
The "hooking into" copy-prop actually makes a lot of sense now that I look, and it's not really that bad. All we're doing is saving state from the last block and using it on the new one. I'm inclined to think it's exactly what we want to do, maybe with minor adjustments.
I do still think we should hold off on the "iter" part though.