In EditController, the _edit() method calls defaultContext() with the related parameter set to true, which eventually causes _modelAttributes() to try to load related fields.
For cc-assess Project instances, this unfortunately produces a Waterline find() operation that tries to load all the GeoRegion instances, which is a bad thing – they won't fit in memory.
There seem to be problems on multiple levels.
It's not clear that the related entities loaded by _modelAttributes() are ever made accessible. (In my reading of the code, they're assigned to the related variable, but aren't passed back to the caller.
The loading of related entities in ``_modelAttributes()` isn't restricted to the displayed attributes. It tries to load all fields with a relation, whether they're in the display list or not.