Howdy, All!
I was hoping there’s a not ugly way to ask hugo to "render everything, AND when building ( a page / bundle/ site / what have you…) please tell me in pedantic detail what templates / partials/ content were used, in what order, and were pulled in by what resource.
essentially wanting to make sure I understand how things are being coalesced. and guessed that there is probably a way to output this if hugo is asked nicely…
is this a thing? if not… should it be?
No. But I’m in the final stages of some work that may give you a better view. That said, the work I’m doing is motivated by getting rid of some of the issues we have with server rebuilds and, especially deeply nested transitive content/dependencies. As in, We want to rebuild as little as possible, but we need to make sure that it’s complete.
AWESOME!
Thank you, truly, for sharing your brain with us 
something that might be helpful for people
(while you have your hands in the engine bay anyways)
say I’m wanting to optimize a partial/template/shortcode.
having a way of building every invocation of (sprocket_I_want_to_improve) with ( (sprocket_I_want_to_improve) (sprocket_I_am_improving) )
and compare the differences
(are there any functional difrference in the end result? )
(did the change improve build time?)
obviously, the thread is long and snags easily, and is likely to never really come free… there’s definitely a point of diminishing returns… however I suspect somewhere between ‘nothing at all’ and ‘divination’ 
there’s a sweet spot of sugar vs complexity…
(or at least, that’s where my head went… fwiw)