I have investigated again, yes. It seems to basically work, but Xbmc shows some strange behavior: It returns invalid parameters when there is either a special character somewhere in the path, or the given folder does not contain any playable items (i.e. only subdirectories). It also does not work for files newly added to xbmc. While the browser shows them, Xbmc needs to be restarted until it recognizes them as playable. There might be other issues as well. Most of the stuff can't be changed on the remote side.
I won't add a workaround for Xbmc's non-recursive behavior to xbmcremote because its too easy to break something and cause a lot of network traffic or freeze either Xbmc or xbmcremote.

I have thought about this too but it seems to be a lot of work to do it properly (e.g. restore the browsed path with error handling if a path does not exist any more, sessions need to be stored independently for each configured host, etc...). Lets see what I can do... Won't happen for the next release but maybe later on.