I do exactly the same thing but some of my subsites have nothing to do with each other.
The context-bar is set in www/default-master.tcl. if you add something like
if { [template::util::is_nil context_bar] } {
if { [ad_conn package_key] eq "acs-subsite" } {
set subsite_node_id [ad_conn node_id]
} else {
set subsite_obj_id [site_node::closest_ancestor_package -node_id [ad_conn node_id]]
set subsite_node_id [site_node::get_node_id_from_object_id -object_id $subsite_obj_id]
}
set context_bar [ad_context_bar -from_node $subsite_node_id ]
}
in place of just setting the context bar it will probably do what you want.