Persistent State Objects & Other misc. Questions

[LPSCRYPT]

Hi, been using your node pack to help extend the basic ComfyUI functionality. I have some questions about state management through loop/cycle iterations, and your thoughts on best practices.

1. Loops vs. Cycles
   To my understanding, it seems that the fundamental difference between loops and cycles are that cycles iterate upon a new generation (ie. setting up auto-queue guarantees persistent execution) whereas loops iterate within the same prompt, and thus a loop iteration will not trigger any automatic cycling behaviors (seed randomization, et.c.). Is this basically correct?

2. State Management Practices
   I want to use either loops/cycles to create and manipulate arbitrary JSON/dict information between cycles. I'm seeing how I can read the data between iterations using a Data Monitor node, however is there any way to write to it directly? Or is the only way to create/update a persistent state variable to use Memory Storage node? Also, is there a way to store image data directly into this local storage, for example to persist an image to the next cycle without saving it to disk?

3. Cycle Dry Runs
   Because of how cycles work, do I need to always add conditionals for handling null values for the initial dry run?