My knee-jerk reaction is that you're right on the money. While it might make sense to allow people to check a box in user settings so that they can "ignore" all OT-marked nodes, I think that any additional administrative treatment of topic policing beyond what's done now is likely to fail to have the desired effect. Signal:Noise ratio (in this case, on-topic:off-topic) is very high here at PerlMonks — higher than almost any other specialized online community I've seen. Attempts at stricter controls run the risk of either producing a paradoxical reaction or reducing that "community" aspect (if not both).

Take all of this rambling of mine with a grain of salt. I have no scientific evidence to back this up. I'm mostly going by gut instinct, here.