I think RSpec should provide around(:context)/around(:all). Not because of any particular use case, but simply for API consistency. It's much simpler to tell users "there are 3 kinds of hooks (before, after and around) and each can be used with any of 3 scopes (example, context and suite)". Having some kinds of hooks work with only some kinds of scopes makes the API inconsistent and forces us to add special case code to emit warnings and also write extra documentation for this fact.

Epics can contain both issues and epics as children

Please note that I/O works for both “simple” tasks as well as nested activities.