Seeing attendees while in practice session

I understand the difference between Meetings and Webinars and I know that attendees were visible to the host from the practice room a year ago, though I don't recall it being referred to as a waiting room. We are working in Webinars and those who need to come in as panelists get those invitations. However, last year when using Webinars I, as host of the webinar in the practice session, could see the list of people who had signed in as attendees and were waiting, outside of the practice session, for the webinar to start. If one of our panelists ended up coming in as an attendee, I could see them waiting there and promote them into the practice session as a panelist. This problem came up because we were using a recurring webinar for several sessions of a conference and, if the panelist attended another lecture as a mere attendee, then they could not get in again as a panelist but were banished to attendee-land for the rest of the recurring sessions. From what I can determine, this is still a problem if a panelist attends another session of a recurring webinar as an attendee using the same email as that attached to their panelist invitation. However, I will no longer be able to promote them into the practice session ahead of the start of the webinar - which we would want to do - because I can no longer see any of the attendees until the webinar has been started. It sounds like last year, webinars had a kind of waiting room for the attendees which the host could see but that feature has been discontinued since we last used webinars. Perhaps it is so thecompany can offer this feature elsewhere in their slate of features or perhaps they did not know how organizations like ours (a non-profit, volunteer-run, community organization) were using their products. If anyone sees this from the company, perhaps you could reconsider the removal of the visibility feature for attendees during the practice session. In the meantime, I am stressing to our volunteers and speakers to not use the email attached to their panelist invitation for entering as an attendee. If you have any other solution, I would be happy to hear it. Thanks for your reply.