You are right on with this one. It is a real production killer. Even if you freeze the layers for the surface, it can kill your computer. We had a project when we first ran into this that plan production sheets had 5 EG surfaces, and of course everyone labeled differently. The surfaces were very big so it became unusable in this condition.
We no longer xref any of the "working" base drawings directly, we have a separate linework file for all the non-civil 3D linework and DS in only what we want to display. We had one person here that was trying to design a park with meandering trails that had 13 corridors and over 20 surfaces xref'd into a plan production sheet. Needles to say we had to do some "educating" on how to use the software and data organization.
Bruce