I disagree. This is just an extreme example, but take it down one or two levels and it's extremely common.

Ruby has had this kind of syntax since forever and it's one of the things that people love about it.

> The problem might be that we have most likely not yet handled the edge case situation where a.b and a.b.c doesn't exist

That's not an edge case, that's an expected case. If it doesn't exist, nothing is supposed to happen.