Yup. Lets leave something in place which could royally screw over the data in a Civil3D file. Sure. Makes sense. Then the users can complain how that was screwed up instead. Or users can attempt to understand that things are done for a reason other than to annoy them.
Well, I certainly don't want that either, as I'm sure you already knew.
Never worked in vanilla AutoCAD before, so I've just never used Partial Open - never needed to in Land Desktop, as it opened drawings as quickly as AutoCAD thanks to external DB.
I'll start looking into this more, merely so I can make useful reports to the development team elsewhere, but methinks this may be originating from the internal DB from the outset. *speculation*
What I would like to see from this, as they're never going to backtrack to an external DB again (which is a shame, IMO; would be much easier to manage Styles, etc. across directories of drawings), is to allow demand loading of XREFs that do not provide AEC Objects that are currently being referenced - Station Offset labels from an XREF Alignment, as example.
Not sure; just feel that there's an achievable interim from nothing at all. *shrugs* Haha