Currently the Node.parent field returns a Node of type Parent. This doesn't really help as Parent only provides one additional attribute, needsLayout.

When un parenting a node (or traversing the tree) it would nice to not have to cast the Parent node. If Parent had the attribute 'content:Node[]' then no cast would be required.

For example the code:
var parent = node.parent;
if (parent instanceof Group){
    delete node from (parent as Group).content;
} else if (parent instanceof Scene){
   delete node from (parent as Scene).content;
} else if (...){
//are there other types of parents?
}

would simply be replaced with:
delete node from node.parent.content;

Another solution is to make Scene a Group, in this case Node.parent would just be of type Group and there would only be one API describing the scene graph's parent/children relationship.

This is related to ticket:
RT-5134