Deeper level of product>initiative>feature hierarchy Merged

Hi,

We're trying to organize our product backlog based on the following structure

1. Product Line
   1. Product (a product that could be built and maintained for years)
      1. Feature / Component (a feature that could be built and maintained for a year or a few months)
         1. Epic / MMF (one or a few sprint effort that is released to market, it is valuable and can be announced)
            1. User Story (smaller than a sprint cycle, can be tested and demonstrated, contributes to the MMF)

We've been trying to use Initiative as Epic/MMF and Feature as User Story

Pros.

• can prioritize stories
• can provide visibility on when story will occur (what sprint)

Cons

• Epic (Inititative) level is quite limited, no meta-data
• no abiity to prioritize epics
• no visual view of when epic's begin or expected to end.
• no out-of-the box way to group epics into features
  • we could use goals for that, but i would rather use goals for business and strategic goals
  • we could create a custom field named product feature, but we would not have a clear view of progress / status.

We also got some products that used Initiatives as Features/Components, used Features as Epics, and Requirements as User stories

Pros. 

• You can see when they end (we slot them to the release when they are expected to end)
• You can see high level status of features (initiatives).

Cons.

• no visual for epic (story) progress
• hard to prioritize epics
• can't see when it starts, just when expected to end - and this is bad as epic could be too big to estimate.

What Do We Want?

Any plan to either make initiative hierarchical, or add another element in between product and initiative (for product/component)

Any plan to add visualization that enables to prioritize initiatives (epics) and to show their progress and how they fall into released?