Adding a whole pile on the pile, Thrift faces the same issue: no only structs can contain structs but even with a specific dissector, the IDL definition allows for recursive structures (directly or indirectly).
I didn’t check the other protocol generators (Google Protobuf, Apache Etch, for the ones I know are supported by Wireshark) but it might be the case as well in some of them.
All in all, I think there is a real use for some way of filtering sub-structures in more cases than we might think of.