That makes it clearer, ty! So if I understand, you have groups of objects driving an animation, and want them all in the include list for the distance map and then have them affect or not affect the distance map via animating some other feature of the groups (where you have chosen hiding the groups as that other effect).
You COULD put it under a feature request to have some checkbox (it's not a bug, though), not sure that it would get accepted but you can ask.
As a note there are definitely other things you can do. So if I want Group A of objects to affect the animation from 0 to 89, then Group B that gives a different result from 90 to 179, I'd just animate the positions of Group A and Group B. For the first 90 frames, Group A is "in position" to affect the animation, and Group B is "way far away to not affect the scene", then between 89 and 90 I would just keyframe group A from being "in position" at 89 to "way far away" at 90, and group B doing the opposite, KF'ed to "way far away" and 89 and then "in position" at 90. There are probably other ways to do this too, though :)