So, in other words, there's a license that even the consumer version will recognize that will unlock additional features intended to only be used by NI employees. Anyone know what this license is called internally? Like the Professional license is called LabVIEW_PDS, and the Student license is called LabVIEW_Student. I've heard there's a (non-NI-approved, for obvious reasons) program that can activate any LabVIEW license; maybe someone could use that? For purely educational purposes, of course.
Things like this have been suggested before. The thing is that attempting to break the licensing like this would be a violation of your existing license from NI. Of course, if you don't care about doing so and are prepared to take the consequences, then I guess that's up to you. But I wouldn't expect much help from other community members !
XNodes are fun to play with and it is possible to do so without breaking the NI Licensing system as there have been some examples of XNodes where the diagrams were left unlocked and it was possible to look at the code and figure out from those examples how to make things work. However, various NI folks have made it clear that XNodes are not the future so I doubt we'll ever get an official look at them. Roll on the next edit-time scriptable node !