The section would mean: anything goes.

So this seems (to me) to be indicative of a conflation of What limits we'll place on tolerable OT and How we separate/indicate OT. But they are not necessarily tied!

I think what I'm really hearing advocates say -- though for some reason they don't want to come right out and say it in just so many words -- is: We want to remove all limits on the topics on which people can post, and we believe that having a separate OT section will make this an easier change to swallow.

The second part seems valid to me, even if still a rather crappier solution than a full-blown modern keyword tagging system. But since I wholly disagree with the first part, which is apparently the motivator for the second part, I see no need to argue the second part.

JMHO.

Mods don’t interfere except in legally relevant matters.

Umm.... What?

But you've made me go and double-check myself, and I find that I forgot something important about moderation: Once a post has been "approved into its section", it requires the intervention of a janitor to move it again. So really, except for unapproved posts, janitors wield the all power with respect to moving a post between sections. So the differences I cited two posts up, about how re-designating a post as on/off-topic, are actually much less than I said.

off topic is only tolerated if it's tangential to Perl ... and even then they are often considered [for] "reap." This is subjective

Ok. So what I've been hearing is that (some) people are unhappy with the vagueness of the rules which set the limits on what's considered on topic. That is an absolutely fair complaint! I don't think it follows, though, that the only (or even best) solution is to remove limitations altogether. Maybe we just need to firm up the rules.

OT is subjective and hard to dodge as part of the node flow

Two thoughts:

1. That's one of the pressures that keep the volume of OT posts low: fear of cluttering up our site with off-topic crap. I call it a win. :-)
2. IMHO, users should be resilient enough to handle an occasional OT post in the stream. And if we had a little better keyword tagging, users could actually hide OT posts in the streams.

I think that ship has sailed for PerlMonks

I'm not sure; but what's nice is that, because the winds blow so slowly here, that ship is still only about a half a league out in the bay. We can still bring it back in. Theoretically. :-)

a complete rewrite in a public repo with modern tools, taking cultural lessons from here and UI lessons from SO

I totally agree. I'd love to see someone with the chops (and the tuits) take this on.