This won't help with scenes you want to load over and over, but my solution for my base figures is the same one suggested by Ockham near the top of this thread:  open the CR2 for any new version of a figure I create in a text editor and manually delete all references to --and prop info groups related to-- "control" props.  This way, when I load a character from my figure library, only a single set of CenterOfMass props is loaded and I can navigate the hierarchy without all the superfluous prop clutter.  Also, I tend now to do less saving of scenes and more saving of poses which can then be applied to clean figures and props when I want to generate a scene for rendering.  Saves disk space too since my PZ3s tend to be very large.