_get_referers() is a quite useful function and we sometimes use it outside CMS. What about moving it to some better place in iktomi?
Right now its return value is overcomplicated and difficult to use. Change it to something simpler, probably custom class that we can just iterate through to get all refering objects in addition to ability to group them by class and property?
Its implemention issues count statement and we usually query for all refering objects just after that. In such case count statement is redundant. But on the other hand separate count is resonable in case we have too much objects and want to limit queries.