Last week IOhannes made a patch (as in diff) to toggle hiding of object names for GOP abstractions through the Properties dialog. It's in the Soruceforge patch tracker and works quite well in my short tests. To be able to see the object names and arguments again you need to reenable visibility for object names again.
I don't know if I am repeating myself too much: would it be now also the chance to make these controls available also through messaging? like "pd-subpatch vis 1", but only "pd-subpatch gop 1 100 17 20 20 ...". I guess it shouldn't be too complicated, and since you're working around it, now seems to be the best time for it. If it's already possible for lots of (if not all) GUI objects and menus, why not implement it as well?
by the way, speaking of abstractions and message control (ok, I was the one that spoke about it), I just noticed something: given a subpatch "subpatch", the message ";pd-subpatch vis 1" opens up the window, as expected. When instead of the subpatch an abstraction "abstrct" is used, either ";pd-abstrct vis 1" or ";abstrct vis 1" works. Is this a missing feature, or did I failed to read something?