Are the partitions you are talking about something on Deadline side?
Since if you mean wrapping all work items into a single partition on TOP side then I imagine you lose granular dependencies on input workitems essentially becoming wait for all, which can be undesirable in many scenarios and also is not very friendly towards true dynamic workitems or mixed with other type of partitioning since this sounds like otherwise unnecessary additional partition wrapper and I dont know if you can nest partitions

Indeed we mean waiting for all/part of upstream tasks. Partitions could contain batches that are directly translated to batches in Deadline. The way Deadline works, it takes a frame range and a path template, and manages itself to determine job tasks.
It's true that we might lose some efficiencies this way, but it will be solid, an avoid the race condition of dynamically producing DL tasks.

Partitions are on the houdini side - when we have work items that are per frame, we can partition them into work items that are per job. Deadline needs the frame range for the job, we can provide that from a work item attribute.