Recently I had a case in which I needed to patch inside a Cache region, because of some heavy calculations. During patching / prototyping phase I thought it would be nice to enable a mode in which the cache region retriggers everytime something inside of it changes - probably only when nodes and links are created or deleted, and when values in IOBoxes change, but not when something is moved inside of it.
Of course I could trigger “Force” anytime I want to, or pipe the value out via a BCP, but being able to get rid of that overhead in phases when you are exploring and trying out stuff could speed up development in Cache regions quite nicely…
and actually, this brings up the idea that it might be worth considering a developer mode like you described, but a bit more generalised. There are other places where you might want to use such a mode and not have to think about it when exporting an application.
But I think what you’re asking is difficult or impossible. The design of this region is such that it computes its contents when the BCP changes or when a force input is triggered. I don’t see how it is possible to change the design of the region concept to implement this behaviour. Let the developers correct me if I am wrong. A more general way of looking at it is this: you can write such a region like a cache yourself, but imagine that this behaviour is somehow implemented by the environment.