LR4 - Hierarchical Keyword Metadata Writing Problem

Having found a problem with LR4 in reading hierarchical metadata from photo files, I now seem to have found a similar problem when writing metadata to files.
As before, I use hierarchical keywords with the "/" character as the separator in the photo files metadata.
Let's say I assign the keyword "Christmas" to a photo. This actually has the hierarchy "Events/holidays/Christmas"
When I write out the metadata to the photo, I want, and expect, the hierarchical keyword string to be written: Events/holidays/Christmas.
Instead, what I get are three separate keywords written out separated by commas: Events,holidays,Christmas.
This is pointless - LR4 has just destroyed my keyword hierarchy and just given me a flat list of keywords.
Is this a bug, or is this indeed expected behaviour of LR4? Because if it's the latter, then LR4 is not going to work for me as a metadata editor.
Thanks

That's the expected behavior of LR 3 and 4.   Some background:
There is no widely accepted industry standard yet for handling hiearchical keywords.  (The Metadata Working Group has defined a standard, but I don't know of any application that has implemented it yet.)
LR stores hierarchical keywords in the XMP:HierarchicalSubject metadata field (a non-standard field recognized by LR and Bridge), with the elements of the hierarchy separated by "|", e.g. Events|Holidays|Christmas.   In the industry-standard field XMP:Subject, LR only stores non-hierarchical keywords.  You can control whether the containing keywords (e.g. Events and Holidays) are also stored in the XMP:Subject field with the keyword options Export Containing Keywords and Include On Export.
Other non-standard approaches store hierarchical keywords in the XMP:Subject field, with the elements separated by "|", ".", or "/".  For compatability, LR will recognize those hierarchical keywords when it reads metadata, controlled by the options in Preferences > File Handling.  But LR always writes out its hierarchical keywords using its own non-standard approach.
Perhaps in a few years, the industry will have converged on a standard and implemented it.

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