I think I read it to fast, what you do isn't "dot-walk". Since Dot-walk usually means that you go to another record. Like if I have a incident record as current I can type current.caller_id and I'm not dot-walking, but current.caller_id.email is. Since then I need to go into the caller record to get the email address. The caller_id value is on incident. 

But your problem seems strange. if you use getDisplayValue, does that work?