... hide (cloak) directories I'm not interested in from my working copy?

If you get annoyed that your working copy includes a bazillion megabytes of uninteresting stuff, here's a way to suppress it:

1. create an empty folder in the repository
2. switch all the folders in your working copy in which you're not interested to the URL of the empty folder
3. now those switched folders are empty, and will stay empty even when you update your working copy

If you want to get those folders back, just switch them back to the original URL.