Using "Files/folders to copy" Filters

[metal450]

I was trying to create a profile where I use filters to "list" the specific files to include. There are many individual files scattered throughout the system, and I find the "flat list" (filter) method to be much easier to maintain than the tree-based file & folder selection.

Given that the profile source directory is C:\, I'd assumed this would be simple, with filters like:

/path/to/file1.txt
/path/to/another/file2.txt

However, this doesn't work. Looking at the docs, my understanding is that this is because (even though I've clearly specified a direct path from the root all the way to the file), filters were designed such that it won't actually look for that file unless you either:

1) Use a separate rule to tell it to look in each & every folder along the path to every file, i.e.
/path/
/path/to/
/path/to/file1.txt
/path/to/another/
/path/to/another/file2.txt

or

2) Tell it to recursively scan through every single folder on the entire system, like
*/
/path/to/file1.txt
/path/to/another/file2.txt

Am I missing something here? The first approach makes it impossibly cumbersome to include a list of files; the second makes it impossibly slow to scan through the entire disk.

Is there no way to get filters to simply include a list of files, without having to scan the whole disk or add separate rules to walk through every step in every path of every file? :/