I think I failed to represent the scale in the example. That's a heavily modified function from a code base I'm working on, and the inventory, book, cell etc. dictionaries and lists containing them are all over the place, with similar looping logic (e.g. find item with given label) and combinations are all over the place. Adding the objects to the above function would of course complicate it in the sense that it would get longer, but it would improve the actual example considerably. I will try to come up with better sample code that represents my worries better.
Still, if there's way too much looping logic strewn around the code, that's probably because the code lacks good abstractions for the most routine data access tasks in this code.
If the code used more objects, each data type would be packaged up with its own methods for looping over the data. For code that doesn't wrap every bit of data in a specialized type, you may find that a few small utility abstractions will clean up your code substantially.
The tradeoff is that you must import these functions in every module that needs to use them, since they aren't passed to your code with the object.
