Our PMs are breaking the fundamental model that initiatives have epics that have features. This is the expectation for many reports and for our integrations to engineering tools.
The enabler of the bad behavior is the related tabs functionality to link features directly to initiatives, bypassing epics in the hierarchy. Please remove that or let the admins hide unwanted data linking options from that tab. Better still, if the integrations enforce a parenting pattern, please mimic the same in the related tabs options.
Example of late: a PM calls complaining of how roadmaps work and problems she imagines to be a administrator error, when her features linked directly to initiatives are not appearing as she wants. She creates features directly from the initiative, ignoring the Epics functionality and all we have tried to explain about 3 level hierarchy. If we can remove that UI opportunity for her errors, we can remove a user error that appears later when she is unhappy with roadmaps and integration problems.