It was always directive, documented as:
http://z00m128.github.io/sjasmplus/d...on.html#po_end
(it's more than 10 years old paragraph)
But it didn't work as documented, so I fixed it around v1.11 or v1.12 to work as the docs describe.
*Today* I'm not sure if that was the smartest idea, maybe I should have kept the dirEND() as it was, and change the documentation to describe what the code really does (was just setting "start" address for some other commands like savetap/savesna/...).