You've run into the immaturity of the ACS code base we've inherited, I do believe. Remember that the (ACS Classic) community responded to the first 4.0 release with disgust that such an incomplete piece of work would be labelled "product quality software".
It would be great if folks like you were to start hammering on OACS 4 ferreting out basic missing functionality of this sort. Those of us porting have been rewriting some chunks of the core and other packages but mostly that's centered around removing Oracle dependencies, regularizing content management, support for multiple sitewide search technologies, and (well) the fundamental work needed for multi-db support in the first place.
Feature enhancement has been on the back burner. Clearly this will change once we get our first dual-db releases solid and stable.
And, yeah, if you want to write stuff like this let's get a discussion going here so folks can chime in
with ideas as to what they'd like to see.
