aws s3 sync traverses excluded directory - takes up a long time

This has been discussed elsewhere but I wasn't sure what the response was. I wanted to see if there would be an ability to stop SYNC from traversing an excluded directory because it takes up a lot of time.

When you do a sync from ~/ with --exclude "STAR" and --include "~/Documents/STAR" for example, the sync operation still takes many minutes to complete because it walks through every single file in every directory in the user's home folder. I wish I knew enough to get into the actual code, but I'm wondering if you could stop the SYNC operation from doing this?

Thank you