Old topic but…
As you said, you are using it to store the data so inside you should do things related with this data.
If you need load asset then most probably this asset will be used by something else, and not the data itself, right?
So what I would do:
- store soft reference in your data
- when asset has to be loaded then load it by the actor (or whatever) will use it
- pass the reference to the loaded object into your data function to do something with this loaded aseet