What's the use case you had in mind for this?

Working on a clients build where they had a bunch of reporting tasks for debugging. They didn't want these showing to users via `gradle tasks` as only build masters would use them.

They considered it confusing behaviour that you could suppress non top level tasks from appearing in `gradle tasks` by nulling out (i.e. not setting) a group/description for the task. They tried to hide a top level task using the same mechanism and were surprised when it didn't work.

I'm not sold on the feature, but I can see a kind of case for having hidden tasks as it were if the audience of the tasks is small.

We had the same requirement another client as well - only show build meister tasks (such as release mgmt) when in a build meister (non-developer) context.
Having said that, over time this has become more and more of a none-issue.

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Thanks again for reporting this issue. We haven't heard back from you after our inquiry from November 15th. We are closing this issue now. Please create an issue on GitHub if you still feel passionate about getting it resolved.