'Hide taxonomy terms' hides empty parents of child terms that do have nodes

In regards to the "Hide empty terms" feature.. When displaying a hierarchy of terms and when nodes are only referencing a descendant of a top level term hides term and makes all descendant terms with related nodes unviewable rather than relating these terms to the nodes of descendant terms.

Example: Say your categorizing nodes by locations, for the sake of the example we'll assume all terms are of the same Vocab "Location".. The hierarchy may look like:
CountryA -> StateA -> CountyA -> CityA
CountryA -> StateA -> CountyA -> CityB
CountryA -> StateA -> CountyA -> CityC
When term of type "City" is referenced from a node it is not also associated with its parents terms so that when terms that are truly empty are hidden this also hides ancestors of terms that are not.

How can we get ancestor terms to associate with its decedent terms in this type of structure so that this feature of hiding empty terms can be used properly?