Meir Goldenberg <mgoldenbe@gmail.com> writes:

> I am running on 8.3.1 and am getting the same behavior. In fact, when I run
> on the simple example from my original message, the heading marked FUTURE
> does not get hidden to start with.

Top level headlines are never hidden.

Admittedly, this defeats the purpose of a sparse tree if all the
information you need to filter out is located in such constructs.
However, hiding them would make a view from which it would be difficult
to recover from.

Regards,