Support FeatureTable[PresenceAbsence] for qualitative metrics/indices?

I’m working with the precomputed PICRUSt KEGG/GG tables and I am interested in doing some hierarchical clustering of the GG features based on their functional profiles.

To do that, I would need some kind of distance, but because this data is presence-absence, I am unable to use qiime diversity beta without lying about what type this data is. It would be convenient if there was a beta-qualitative method which accepted presence-absence tables and only exposed the qualitative metrics (much like beta-phylogenetic and beta-phylogenetic-alt).

I imagine a similar thing could be done for alpha diversity as well.

I’m curious what other’s thoughts are on this? Is it perhaps too niche a use-case? At the moment I can only think of Jaccard and Hamming being relevant, but are there others?

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