I only now saw this blog post. Gotta say, I really like this idea. I'm in general a fan of things being on a sliding scale rather than discrete or especially binary, and both the in-character reasoning and the gameplay aspects of this make a whole lotta sense to me.
In other words, Alex, you've done it again. You've seen a problem where most people wouldn't even notice one, and developed an effective, elegant solution for it that makes the game even better than it was before. Kudos to you, man! You rock!
I keep saying this, but most developers should take a look at Fractal Softworks for a model of how to do things. You may be a small house, but damned if your professionality isn't leaps and bounds above industry standards. (And I'm not even saying this because I agree with every single design decision made, but the ones where I disagree are few and far between as well as genuine differences of opinion.)