Viewing subfolders in Stacks?

I keep a few folders in the Dock for easy access to documents and information, like the Documents folder, for example. In previous versions of Mac OS X, navigating to subfolders in my Documents folder was as simple as clicking and holding on the icon in the Dock to bring up the contents in a menu, and then mousing over whatever subfolder I wanted to look into, which would in turn display the contents of that folder. This menu-style display was very efficient. With OS 10.5, however, my Dock folders were automatically turned into Stacks. Stacks seem to lack the ability to view subfolders directly. Instead, the user must click on the folder in the stack which then opens it in a normal finder window. This is far less efficient, and it seems odd to me that Apple didn't consider this issue. Is there any option for viewing sub folders in a Stack, or to simply turn Stacks off for folders? I like the idea of having a downloads stack, or being able to quickly create a Stack by dragging a collection of documents to the Dock, but it just seems a step backwards for viewing folders.