The node selection pop-up dialogs provide different data storage inspectors to select data nodes from the data storage.
They always show all existing data nodes, regardless of their node type. This might be confusing, since helper-objects are also visible.
The preference page of the data manager allows to show / hide the helper-objects explicitly. I suggest to add such an option to the Node Selection preference page as well.
I understand the reasoning behind that feature request, but I think it should be discussed. At least it contradicts one of the key assumptions of the new selection concept: relevance criteria is defined localy in the view.
Introducing a preference that activates or deactivates the visebility of helper nodes globaly would take away local control. I think in most cases you do not want have the helper nodes selected at all. But then the you just have to compose the right predicate. If this is not done for a selection widget it is an design error there. One can make the assembly of an predicate easier by e.g. offering a convinience function, that just ads a No-Helper-Node-Predicate. But in the end I would always opt for keeping the decision local to the view.
If a view want the user to decide if it views helper nodes or not, it should be a dedicated preference page of the view.
I checked some of the most important plugin views and their storage inspectors / selection widgets and couldn't find something that needs to be tackled right now. I will close this task for now but we should keep an eye on the "helper nodes" appearing in some selection dialogs of specific plugin views.
And I agree that the the local plugin view should care for the right predicate.