Yes, we definitely see the innovator’s dilemma here.
Dynalist had [[ links before Roam Research started (we introduced it in April 2016), and we had always wanted to go deeper in that direction. But like you pointed out, if we want to introduce it now, it has to be non-disruptive to current Dynalist users. We’re well aware not all Dynalist users need it.
Right now our consideration is to make the bottom “references” area only show when you turn on an option, plus providing a convenience utility to find out how many places linked to this node.
Still, this only applies to links to full nodes, not [[text segment]]. But since [[text segment]] doesn’t do anything at all right now, we can hook it up to global search, which will search for all occurrences of exactly [[text segment]] (linked occurrences) and in another section results for text segment (unlinked occurrences).