There was a discussion about this
here.
Brax makes some good points about the various hide options.
In this case, the away message serves an important purpose. As a compromise, I added the hide away reminder option to hide messages for 10 minutes in a very specific context, ie. in query windows during a conversation.
That said, this does mean that the feature will only work if you have enabled "Show away in active window" and you are in a query window at the time, which limits its usefulness. I will see if I can extend the contexts it works in, but it will still be hidden for 10 minutes at most.