One shortcoming in the EA implementation of SysML is its lack of support for compartment-based representations of SysML features. For example, the SysML specification (e.g. Figure 9.7 in section 9.4.3) shows a "flow properties" compartment with flow properties represented as attributes with "in", "out", or "inout" prefixes. EA, on the other hand, only provides* the composite diagram + Flow Property "part" as a "built-in" method of realizing a flow specification. Likewise, Block properties (parts) can only be displayed by showing the composite diagram contents, not by means of compartments (as shown in Table 8.1 of the SysML 1.1 spec).
Ideally, both representations should be available for a given set of model elements. In other words, it should be possible to represent properties on a SysML internal block diagram in a "properties" or "parts" compartment on the parent block definition diagram, or as elements in a diagram frame on the parent block definition diagram, depending on the "display features" options for the block. As it is, the need to use "show composite diagram contents" in order to display a block's owned features is clumsy and gets in the way of a compact, neat representation of SysML system models.
* It's possible to "fake in" compartment-based SysML features by judicious choice of attribute stereotypes, but this isn't directly supported by the SysML stereotypes provided by EA and is in any case just that - "faking it in".
