Option to lock position of elements regardless of visibility

I've seen this request in various guises in the forum so thought I should add my voice for my particular use cases:
I would find it very useful to be able to make elements invisible without musescore adjusting the layout of the score.
A simple example is making an educational worksheet where the student needs to fill in the time signature. I select the time signature, press V and it goes invisible, but simultaneously loses it's position to the first notes of the piece.
A more niche use-case is trying to do some fancy video editing of a score - I want two versions of my score, one a normal score and one a set of empty staves. Then I can gradually reveal the notes as the score plays back. I select everything I want to be invisible, and press V. And MuseScore adjusts the spacing of the staves and systems.

I know that these automatic systems for making scores look good have been hard won, and make a huge difference to our general lives in writing good looking notation. But please can we have the option to make it pause those actions?

I expected the Properties>Auto-place tick box to have this functionality, but unfortunately that removes all the good formatting that has already been done, and so is not an option.