I’m not sure how the concatenation+enlisting compares performance-wise to just running the the filter twice, but it looks less redundant, at least. I imagine that the more complex the outer filter, the more you save by doing it this way.
Looking up Conditional Shortcut Syntax it mentions that it, indeed, is a “shortcut syntax” …but not what is it a shortcut for. I’m guessing it is a listwidget.
Regardless, I’d definitely think some string ops should be faster than rerunning the filter again (which would search everything!), and this idea can be used also without the <% ...%> syntax, i.e it is as usable in regular nested listwidgets. Cool!