As summarized in the title, why not adding the Component the possibility to have its hitTest returning true only for the specified area, rather than only relying on true/false or by subclasses reimplemeinting hitTest just for that?
I have already had to create my own sublcasses of a couple of the JUCE widgets just to add that feature, so I think having it in the base class wouldn't hurt
To implement this in the Component base class would involve adding a Rectangle structure to the base class. So it'd increase the size of all Component objects in everybody's codebases by at least 16 bytes, which would be unjustifiable for such a rarely-needed feature, especially when it's really easy to implement it yourself in a sub-class.
