[maya]controller nodes and how to disable them

[fruit...@gmail.com]

Hi folks,

I start looking at the "controller" nodes (new 2017 feature, if I'm correct), used to tag objects as controllers and (finally !) override maya pickwalks.

It works great, but I'm looking for a clean way to disable them :
in a nutshell, while I'm still working on the rig, I want to have an accurate pickwalk (e.g. to take the shape of my ctl), and enable all my controller nodes at publish time only, for animators.

As expected, none of the native options work (node effect, ...), so I started messing around with the connections (essentially using a "childrenDelayed" attribute instead of the children message array attribute. But then maya becomes a bit unstable.

Any suggestion on how to approach this ?

Thanks