I think you're falling into the old trap of hoping for a single metric to perfectly sum up a complex situation. As is often the case, no single number does that. The price changes of everything get tracked and analyzed and used for various purposes. Looking at different areas separately can tell you different things. You can go look up how houses, food, and gas prices have changed - nobody is concealing this information from you. But if you want a number that perfectly summarizes inflation, you're simply looking for something that does not and can not exist. Inflation is complex and happens for different things at different rates.

So, yeah, some metrics exclude some things so that they can better see the other things. That doesn't mean that the excluded things don't matter, it means that whatever metric you're looking at just doesn't include those things. If you want to see an inflation rate including those things, look at an index that includes them.