But.... I have just hit a snag...
Having an environment for administrators to edit, with an environment
within it with higher level permissions that the admins arent supposed
to see, makes it really easy to accidentally set the permissions
recursively down the tree so that administrators can see everything.
I find it difficult to keep track of permissions in my sites so..
I solved this by having separate trees for each level of permissions,
and cross linking between them.
Having the #environment settings preference facilitates this approach...
so I think a compromise might be keep just the #environment setting.
Keith