I don't use

N/cache

because it seems unpredictable. Then again, I don't have a lot of need to use it either, perhaps by design?

Its good for stuff like looking up settings records that don't change often.. can save you some governance if you're doing it a ton... I haven't run across a huge need to use it at all yet

aye, in my scripts I'm usually loading/caching something once. I can see this coming up on M/R scripts under certain designs but I tend to prefer explicitly sending data in-band between stages rather than relying on a separate external 'cache' module.

you can do that until you hit super large data sets which they've kind of fixed w/ upping the limit between stages

I tend to think large data sets between stages as an antipattern, though it may be unavoidable sometimes I suppose