After debugging the issue it seems something in dee or below it as become more asynchronous and it happens that sometimes the hud-client gets the name of the dee model to use but the hud-service is still not the leader of that dee model, that causes dee-qt to get confused and think the model has no columns.
mhr3 has suggested the hud-service should wait for "notify::synchronized" on the dee model and then return the name to the hud-client.
After debugging the issue it seems something in dee or below it as become more asynchronous and it happens that sometimes the hud-client gets the name of the dee model to use but the hud-service is still not the leader of that dee model, that causes dee-qt to get confused and think the model has no columns.
mhr3 has suggested the hud-service should wait for "notify: :synchronized" on the dee model and then return the name to the hud-client.