Is there an assessment or response from engineering regarding this bug report?
No one's really looked into this yet. As it's an RFE, you should create a Jira Epic so PM and Engineering can track and schedule it accordingly. At this point it's definitely not going into ODF 4.9, moving to 4.10.
Yet again, no one has followed up on this, moving it out to ODF 4.12.
No plans to fix this in near future.