Ability to duplicate a mesh linked displaying individual parts of it each time, using vertex groups.

Let's say I have this mesh and I want to duplicate it linked, so not to add extra vertices, edges, faces etc in my project. Now each linked object, I would like to showed-up sometimes as it is... ...or sometimes as a part of it. Why not separate our mesh in parts using vertex groups and then add the ability to show or hide those vertex groups for each linked object?

I added a relative question at blender.stackexchange.com and I get the answer that I can do that using mask modifier. But the "problem" is that using mask modifier, I get extra vertices, edges, faces etc which sometimes we wanted to avoid.