I was afraid of that. If there are any Sketchup developers out there, this would make a great plugin or, better yet, version upgrade!

Oh, and thanks for the would-be complement, but unfortunately I have no idea how to do photo-realistic rendering.

I am trying to make multiple holes in a component using different "cut-through" objects as the holes without disrupting the component itself. The ones I make only work if the surface I'm "drilling through" is not already a component. To put the pre-made hole into a preexisting component I have to edit the component itself and copy/paste the hole into the component, which then changes every other iteration of that component. I want to avoid making the other components unique. Is there a way to do this?

As a practical explanation, say I was designing an end table like the one in the picture. It has 4 legs that are identical (or mirrored) when milled up, but the mortises for the joinery in the front legs are different than those in the back. I would typically make one leg, duplicate and flip it 3 times to make 4 legs, each mirrored appropriately, then make the back two "unique" so I could mortise for side and back aprons in one back leg, and for side aprons only in a front leg. The respective mortises would then be transcribed from the left leg to the right leg on the correct face.

Now let's say I want to resize or add a taper to the legs. As created above, I would have create the taper twice - one front and one back. Not too difficult with 4 legs, but for resizing an entertainment center that has 12 panels, each with different holes or dadoes would take forever. What I want is to have sketchup treat the joinery separately, so all of the "same" parts could still be multiple iterations of the same component and adjustments to the design would only need to be done once.

Has anyone done this?

(Image borrowed without permission from this site and is to serve as example only. I claim no ownership of the photo or the design of the table in the photo.)