Hiding first stem in group hides beam

I try to hide the first stem in a beam group and expect this to keep the beam, just as happens if you hide any other stem in the group. However, the whole beam goes away. I run lilypond version 2.18.2 on a Mac. Code snippet that demonstrates the issue follows. The first two beam groups show the e

\override BassFigureAlignment #'stacking-dir broken 2.14.2-1

> I'm not top posting. \version "2.14.2-1" % Changing the stacking-dir for BassFigureAlignment seems % to be broken when adding the figures to the staff rather % than creating a separate FiguredBass "staff". % Here it works fine... << \new FiguredBass { \figuremode { \override BassFigureAli