Using this package that relies strictly on external cache to retrieve the roles, even after they have been retrieved from cache from previous calls.

This negates any possibility of eagerly loading the data from an initial query, in cases where collections are returned, which is very important.

$user = User::with('roles')-get();
$user->hasRole( .. );
$user->hasRole( .. );

This results in 2 cache retrievals from your external cache.

We have in some cases some complex permission schemes within a collection, which results in hundreds of calls to Redis.

An older version of the application does not suffer from this issue, but I'm not clear why you opt'd to always visit the external cache over in memory. See 4860bc0