TreeItem - leaf property wrappers (and others) are private. Should be protected?

Question

I was creating a TreeItem subclass. Instead of overriding isLeaf and other methods, I simply wanted to use binding so that when the "value" changed, I could set the leaf property, or just bind to the leaf so that the value is updated when my domain object's value changes. However I noticed that both setLeaf and the leaf property wrapper are both private. This forces me to override isLeaf. All I wanted to do was setup some binding expressions or at least a change notifier when the value changes and set the leaf value according. The leaf property is a wrapper and the documentation suggests that a wrapper property was created to help support this scenario directly.  Since my isLeaf computation takes awhile, I have to setup several lines of code to cache the value whereas binding allows me to simplify my code and set it when the value changes, etc.
Should these properties and the set* companion methods be protected instead to support subclassing using the new property system in javafx?
Otherwise, there is no easy way to inform the UI that the "leaf" property has changed. Overriding isLeaf does not do that.
jdk8 ea

Answer 1

This sounds like a good tweak request to file in the Jira issue tracker here: http://javafx-jira.kenai.com
Thanks!
-- Jonathan