Gee. This was only brought up in 2005. Maybe by 2105 it will be addressed by the geniuses at autodesk!
There is a Link at the top of the Forums Page "IDEAS". This is the location of the wish list for Inventor. "Items/Wishes/Enhancements/Fixes" need to be posted to the IDEAS page. Items that gain a high number of "Likes" are the ones that ADSK looks at, for the upcoming releases of Inventor.
If the posters didn't feel it needed a Post to the IDEAS page.....
Hi Mitchell,
Indeed, it is embarrassing to see an old request is still not yet fulfilled. The issue here is that if it was that easy, it would have been done already. Not being a genus is not an excuse either though. Anyway, let me explain how coloring works at Inventor assembly level. The color control at assembly level is mainly by Design View Representation. For a given design view, Inventor stores color overrides to each component in the design view at the assembly level. You can also link lower level design view to upper level. In this way, the amount of data to be stored is not much and managing such data is quite efficient. It is basically proportional to number of components.
Now, if we add face or feature override to the mix, the equation will be changed. In theory, each component can have n number of faces and n number of features. Then we will be dealing with n^2 or n^3 problems. Compounding with component color override, it can make the appearance behaviors at assembly level very hard to understand. This is why it has not been implemented. There might be other ways to deal with it but we have not done much research yet. If you feel strongly about the request, please submit an idea to Inventor Ideas forum or give kudos to existing ones.
Many thanks!