Right now pathspecs are kind hairy due to Java's lack of nice hashmap and List literals:

in javascript:

r.table('foo').filter({x: {y: {z: "bar"}}})

turns into the java query:

r.table("foo").filter(r.hashMap("x", r.hashMap("y", r.hashMap("z", "bar"))))

Since depth-first is more common in path-specs than breadth first, it might make sense to have a special r.pathspec convenience that creates the appropriate hashmap structure. It might look something like:

r.table("foo").filter(r.pathspec("x", "y", "z", "bar"))

I haven't really thought about branching pathspecs too much, maybe there's no syntax that would work well. It's something to think about.