For a (very) large and complicated intake form I have checkboxes that based upon the value (checked/unchecked) should calculate the visibility of multiple sections of the form. I guess most of us remember Tim Tripcony’s comment on a question about partial refresh on SO. That seemed to work fine from scratch but the intake form has grown and grown during the years due to regulations and the responses from the chained xsp.partialrefreshget calls gone bad. As a result sometimes the other sections pop up very late or not at all 
I notice that a Full Update on the checkbox does the job must better (for the onclick server side event, the onchange server side event seems to be broken) but than the user loses focus from the checkbox, which not occur with the xsp.partialrefreshget function.
On my quest for alternatives I stumbled on the following post on SO: How to set focus at different times on a page after refreshing? I implemented Knut‘s answer but noticed that the getComponent always want to trigger and initially I have not set any control to put focus on. So here is my adaption:
For the checkbox on the onclick event I set a viewscope with the ID of the checkbox:
For the XPage I add 2 events. In the beforePageload event I set a default viewscope, in case not a checkbox has set the scope variable. In the onClientload event I check for a viewscope and set focus on the element from the viewscope. Because setting focus on a checkbox will mark it with and additional border (which the form does not has with a partial refresh) I remove the focus afterwards.
This seems to do the trick, somehow. Not 100% the same as with a partial refresh but the focus somehow remains on the section of the form with the checkbox.
I am not sure how many kittens I slay with this approach Let me know if you see any alternative work-arounds.