Well, this is not an easy answer, but after too much research, I found them, which are the only 2 articles that explain anything. They explain how to access the repository directly outside the Component (if necessary), and also mention the philosophy of pure functions / functional programming, as well as potential performance problems when directly connecting non-component functions to the repository. Personally, I went with @anoop and passed the parameters around in one object as deep as necessary.
For a direct connection (which receives storage from this.context, as connect () does, see the discussion here and, in particular, the gaearon comment of September 16, 2015 and September 22, 2015. It seems that this access can be achieved through connect ()
For a little read on functional programming / pure functions see discussion here
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