get path-to-alias, path-to-work etc recursively in Hive

Sometimes, we don't get correct alias/part desc/etc. from a split path because the path has subdirectories - e.g. in HIVE-15870 (for MM tables).
We have utility methods to work around that by getting the partdesc recursively from the parents of a path, but they are not applied consistently; I suspect people add calls to these methods after they discover some particular codepath is broken. Perhaps we should find such places proactively for path-to-part, path-to-work, and path-to-alias maps.
This can happen much more with MM tables, but can also happen for any recursive-path cases (incl. just a regular recursive path read enabled via an MR config).