@NWF:
Maybe having holding_fruit is a good idea. It has its charm.
"[...] your suggested holding_apple grape search, but any results of that are still going to appear in a holding_fruit apple grape search" is a particularly good point.
On the other hand, it's clearer to me that holding_flower and holding_hat are valuable tags, because when I search for holding+hat and holding+flower, I see much noise (for example, people wearing hats while holding other things, instead of just holding hats). When I search for fruit+holding, I virtually only see people holding fruits.
You said:
"The point of having a tag like holding_fruit would be to be able to assist in finding any type of fruit being held, because of how general holding is, there are probably an extremely large combinations of reasons an image will be able to be tagged with any sort of fruit and not actually involve the character holding the fruit that is tagged, but holding something else."
Your point is not true yet, but probably it will be, after holding is better populated. Most images of holding_apple are not even tagged holding yet.
Apple, peach and strawberry are the most popular fruit tags, with 2300+ posts each. All the others have less than 1300 posts and a number of them merely have less than 100 posts. If having too many posts makes one fruit tag a "special case", then we would have these three candidates.
Assuming that, at the very least, all images of people holding fruits should be tagged holding, my next project in short-term is:
Populating holding_strawberry, as I'm curious to see what it would have in conjunction with other tags. If people decide to use only holding_fruit for all fruits together, (or just holding, why not) this step presumably can be done very easily with an alias or mass-edit. If people decide to keep holding_strawberry for whatever reason, then it and holding_apple can be implicated to holding or to holding_fruit (which then would be implicated to holding)
Do I really self-compliment that much? If you have some time, please let me see other examples of me doing that. I'd probably feel ashamed if you searched as far as one to four months ago, since at that period I got scolded by some Danbooru users wiser and more experienced than me, for my self-assured behaviour.
That said, it may be tiring to you, but "the ones I populate tend to be nearly flawless AFAIK." is a fact, pertinent enough to be said here, but not important enough that I'd assume someone noticed. You can still make your own judgement; be my guest.