You could use the javascript to just hide panels instead of the fields. There was a element that I believe was intended to do something like this, but has since become obsolete/deprecated (and I never got it to work properly anyway), and in 7.6 i can't even find it anymore. I assume it was finally just removed altogether (I can't recall the name of it either).
If nobody can help with a simpler solution, I could probably help clean up that javascript code (i've gotten marginally better with js since I wrote that article) and apply it to panels as needed if you decide you have to go that route.