Open-API for debugger

I know this has been discussed. I have read prior articles regarding this. Perhaps I did not understand previous posts well enough, but the amount of work that would go into those solutions seemed huge. Let me give an example of what I want to accomplish.

When viewing an object of a certain type I want to have control over what gets displayed as the child nodes of that object. First of all, I have an ArrayList that has an array of soft references. Currently to view the contents of this list is a pain, as I have to expand each element and the look for the "referent" sub-value. This gets messy very quickly and I lose my train of thought and my productivity is definitely not what it could be.

I would love to write a simple plugin that would let me control the tree node for objects of particular types. I am open to the other options that have been suggested but have no clue how this could be done. Is this something that is currently possible? Can this be made possible in the next version of Idea? (after Aurora) If not, why not?