Michael,
Just some thoughts as grist for your dev mill.
It occurs that the 'Hide' button is currently under-employed, but necessary.
Possably, it could trigger a pop-up box that offered naming, grouping, selection by name or group toggling visability, all the way to a complete heirachy, visability editor. Structure that how you choose, it offers an interface friendly (meets your expressed UI design preferences) possable approach to some of the 'wants' expressed on the forum, layers/groups, object naming, flexability in visability etc.
At the least, input for your creative process.
Cheers
Spinner

Yup, such a mechanism makes sense.

The only problem is that a mechanism that does all that stuff is going to take quite an effort to develop, it will be a major investment of time...

Time well spent, certainly, but it will probably be a little while before it can come together.

- Michael