Ok, keep in mind that JME3 is not just an incremental improvement over JME2… it’s mostly a rewrite. So something missing that was in JME2 wasn’t necessarily ‘removed’… it just wasn’t added.
A boolean only covers the simplest use-cases that are also easily covered by a scene graph reorganization. The real enhancement should probably use an int of maskable bits so you could have different values for clickable things versus character ray test things versus ???. It’s not just as simple as “hack in a boolean and have to support it forever henceforth”. Because there were usually other good reasons to reorganize the scene anyway… the feature just never bubbled up in my priorities again. (And I guess no one else’s, either.)