Block displaying one parent and many children nodes using only Views 3 Drupal 7?
I've achieved the desired output by creating a vocabulary of taxonomy terms which is essentially just a flat list of foreign keys. There is no semantic representation of a hierarchy here.

NOTE: This is a different example than the event calendar I described in the comments of my initial post, however the data model is the same.


Parent content type (Rich Menu) contains this taxonomy term field, in this example called "Menu".
Child content type (Rich Menu Item) also contains the "Menu" taxonomy term field.
If Rich Menu Item is a child of Rich Menu, the two term fields are set to match. NOTE: I wonder if this idea can be simplified using node references (References module) instead of taxonomy.


Then I created a new block view called "Rich Section Menu". This block will display the parent content type, Rich Menu, filtered by the taxonomy term from the field "Menu" (value = Section). Create an attachment to be displayed after the block which will render a list of children from the Rich Menu Item content type. The child content type will also be filtered by the Menu term field (value = Section). NOTE: Adding the relational term field to the list of filters is only necessary if you expect to have multiple parent/child relationships that share the same content types.

Tried to post screenshots of my Views configuration for clarity, but my reputation isn't high enough.

This achieves the output I desire, however it's a bit simplistic. I would prefer to create a semantically correct parent/child hierarchy using taxonomy or node references, and have Views render that output in a single block, without an attachment, with support for children more than one level deep.

So this works, but is there any way that I can do it better?