Excluding inherited product relationships-Collection of common programming errors

Our client has come across a situation where they want a product relationship that is defined in the based catalog to NOT inherit into the Virtual Catalog OR they want to be able to invalidate/exclude inherited relationships in the Virtual Catalog.

The Catalog Manager UI will not allow one to remove a product relationship if it is inherited from the Base Catalog.

My assumption is that the catalog relational database system cannot handle this type of scenario.

The only suggestion that I came up with is to use the Description field of the relationship itself to store a magic value like inactive’.

Then, at runtime, when this product relationship is being used to display a product, we could check the relationship description field  for that magic value prior to displaying the product.

My question to you all is if you think there is a better way to do that.