We don't intend to add this no.
Being able to recover your bitcoin, in extremis, from your wallet words is a real life saver.
With Classic support calls we would always ask if the user had made backups. I only ever recall ONE person saying that they had, normally the reply was a deafening silence.
We call it the 'wallet words promise'. As long as you write down your wallet words and keep them safe, you can get your bitcoin back.
Why don't you do like Electrum does? You can not import private keys to a wallet created with seed, however you can import private keys to a seedless wallet. We can easily switch between these two wallets.
Isn't there a 'sweep' option?
-snip-
2. Someone asked me the other day, "How can MultiBit HD be trusted if it isn't open source?" I was under the impression that MultiBit HD was open source, but it seems like I was incorrect about this?
Thanks!
https://multibit.org/blog/2014/08/13/multibit-hd-is-now-open-source.htmlhttps://github.com/bitcoin-solutions/multibit-hd/.
1) We don't want to support the import of random private keys because it means that your wallet words cannot be used to recover your bitcoin in all cases. We call this 'the wallet words promise'. There were multiple occasions with MultiBit Classic over the years where random private keys were lost, even after rolling backups and encrypted private key exports were added. We don't want people to lose bitcoin.
Because of how we connect to the Bitcoin network sweeping an arbitary private key, of unknown age, is very inefficient to import. We have to resync from the genesis block which is not user friendly.
2) MultBit HD is all open source. Your friend is somewhat correct in that the very early beta code was kept in a private github repo for a while. We were doing a lot of experimental work/ large refactors so didn't want people forking in the very early days.
Also, the executable jars have no obfuscation in them - they are very easy to decompile and even have all the comments in.