Repo-level setting to disable --recursive option in all submodule operations

We have a parent repo that consists of third party git repos as submodules inside a vendor folder. We also have more of our own repos as "library" submodules, and those submodules also have a vendor folder.

Those on the team using command line are able to check out and submodule init in the root folder, and then they get our library submodules and the root repo's third party content, but WITHOUT the library submodules' third party content.

This is a problem because having multiple libraries, e.g. Zend, confuses our intellisense.

As far as I can tell, with SourceTree we can either get all or nothing, and if I manually init it via command line I have to be very careful because the wrong double click can initialize them recursively, ruining that careful work.

Ideally we can get a clear option to better control this behavior, or at least a way to toggle the recursion flag on/off.

I understand this may not be a super common use case, but it does seem to be an actual limitation of SourceTree, as pairing it with the command line accomplishes the desired goal fine. I very much wish I could do all of this within SourceTree, and not have to tiptoe around the Submodules listing there lest it initialize the whole enchiladas.