You could select a bigger area of the sound effect than you need, then you could trim in the arrange window to taste and still have handles. Or Nuendo could by default add X seconds of handles.
But as I said, copying a 180MB file over while only needing a 5 second portion of that fills the project harddrive pretty quickly when you do that dozens of times in a project.
Re-using the same clip, no. You can still duplicate a clip in the arrange window. But importing another selection of an original, longer file, yes, it would create a new file with a new name of course. I guess that’s what you meant.
I guess since some of you rely on original data and names of files it would be nice to somehow accomodate both ways of working. There could be a choice. Spot selection to timeline and keep whole file, or spot selection to timeline and trim file to selection.