The real solution is off-drawing parts lists and hand created balloons. Never. Ever. Fails. I have a preference for Excel sheets that are designed to validate against the model tree. I can generate the entire PL, including items that aren't modeled yet, including the assembly, setting up for the ERP system, and a large number of follow-on drawing creation and validation steps.
The way regions work has always appeared to me to be the work of one really talented summer intern they hired for release 10 and have never updated since. As a result it is a brilliant piece* of inadequately designed software that requires far too much hand-holding to work right. The amount of user up-front work and maintenance work is greater than the effort to handle it manually. PTC will never fix it because too much user product depends on the original flawed work, so the only option is to add more code to the distribution and that means two implementations to keep track of. All that could happen is an overlay that can generate the user code and maybe a debugger, but it's not likely.
*Not sarcasm - it does get a lot of mileage out of a flawed foundation. Exactly what I would expect from an under-grad student who didn't understand how PLs & BOMs are supposed to work. So they built a complicated programming language with no debugging facility to allow users to program it to do what it should do OOTB.