Residual mates to suppressed subassemblies

I have a base assembly which acommodates many (up to 12) customer optional
modules.
There are many permutations of the modules and many limits of which modules
can be used together on the base assembly.

I have handled this in the past by saving the master assy with all customer
modules suppressed, then simply unsuppressing the modules I want.

The annoyance is that if you do this then the mates which had constrained
the module to the base assembly are not suppressed but are left as broken.
On some previous versions, (was it 2001+) when you suppressed a module, its
mates to the outside world were automatically suppressed also.

I cannot for the life of me imagine why there would be some use for
preserving these now broken mates to a suppressed module. There seems to be
no way to change this behaviour.

Since there are many pernutations of 1..12 modules, setting a configuration
for each combination is clearly unrealistic.

Leaving the base model loaded up with 30 or 40 broken mates works, I can
live with it, but it seems dumb, is probably CPU inefficient and may
contribute to instability.
Anyone have any ideas?

Best Regards
Malcolm Cox