ansible tower, inventories, group and host_vars

We’ve implemented our ansible directory structure for multi-stage environments as per the digital ocean blogpost
The inventory files and roles vars are separated out in this manner and kept in version control along with the ansible code.

We’re now looking at tower however, Tower seems to want us to import the vars as per the docs here or add them to an inventory.
This seems like a step backward - maybe I’ve missed something?

Is there any way to get tower to use the environment specific inventores and their relative group_vars and host_vars directories?

Regards,

Asil