[Lunatixz]

For what it's worth, I believe the impact would be minimal, though I could be wrong.

I don't see how it would be a minimal impact, I believe you are thinking solely of your plugin and not Kodi as a whole with multiple plugins storing their own respective properties of varying size and type (ie not all values will be strings).

When a call to Files.GetDirectory is made, the entire code at that endpoint is executed, including log statements, external calls, properties being set, etc... which leads be to believe that they can be read "in the same breath" as all of the other InfoLabels. I'm not saying this isn't a non-trivial change, but rather that I don't expect it would be a major one.

Currently, GetDirectory can only return a finite amount of keys; custom properties could be near infinite.
You're more than welcome to give it a shot: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc ... otherwise, it can only be suggested in hopes someone takes on the work.

I simply don't see how it could be more of an impact. There would be basically no extra time needed for "persisting" them, as they would just be being returned on the fly, just as the InfoLabels do... so why not just append them to the response "as they are set"? I realize this is all an oversimplification, and admittedly due to my own inexperience

I'm absolutely willing to give it a shot, as I mentioned in my original post... but I really have no idea where I'd even begin to look inside the codebase.

I'm simply trying to figure out a solution to this. Unfortunately, as outlined in my other thread (and demonstrated by my example), there isn't even a way to get one of the properties "on-demand", even if I know which property I'm looking at ahead of time.

Guess its one of those things will have to see when/how its implemented; however, InfoLabels are loaded into memory; nothing on the fly about it them. They are not listitems rather a dynamic representation of a single listitem key. From my recollection, there is NO connection between them and JSONRPC getDirectory.