Yes, this is another example of what's been happening continuously through development - Larian is extremely reluctant to actually change or fix anything, and far prefer to plaster over issues with quick-hack kludge-jobs. There's a thread elsewhere where I show screenshots of being able to access Shadow's spellbook in a similar way; they haven't *Actually* disabled your access to these panels and these characters, all they've *actually* done is put in a kludge fix that just auto-closes the panel again when it opens, and it's poorly done enough that you can still, to this day, get around it.
