This is more of a “wish-list” item that came up during a discussion with a customer training I was doing.
The question always comes up…”how do you turn on specific elements that have been hidden?” Well, the answer(s) isn’t the best…you can look through the Selection Tree and look for elements that have been “grayed” out, Unhide All (then re-hide the objects that are supposed to stay hidden), make the object/objects a Selection Set so you can manage them a little easier, etc. Basically, there isn’t a good way.
One of the users brought up the idea of having a “Reveal Hidden Elements” mode like Revit has, which is a great idea. Here’s to hoping that Navisworks 2014 (whenever that comes out) will have such a “feature” to help with object visibility.