Matt I think many/most people get what you are saying. However, instead of listening to the users, you keep trying to provide a convincing, innocuous sounding analogy. In sticking with your analogy, in what world would anyone make pineapple pizza the default? It is pretty well understood that the default, based on long standing custom/tradition/cultures, is a cheese pizza. Pineapple is a topping. Most people will not consume Hawaiian pizza. Don’t even think of suggesting “well people could just pick off the pineapple and put it to the side”. The pizza would be considered tainted/spoiled because of the lingering pineapple juice and the smell. Even attempting to make Hawaiian pizza the default is going to make people question your judgement and not trust you and your team. You might get temporary pass with the attempt at a culture norm shift if you were pregnant. However, the temp pass does not mean the culture norm shift would succeed. The temp. pass means people would disregard the effect that the pregnancy had on your judgement at the moment. If questionable decision making were to become your default then people will self-segregate away from you. By self-segregate I mean leave, separate, depart, abandon.
The users do not want what you are proposing. This is not a vocal minority thing. The use of the phrase “vocal minority” will come across as condescending, and that your mind is made up. Have you considered my post where I suggested splitting Fedora into 2 cleanly separate distro/repo pairs? One with full telemetry and the other with no telemetry at all? Opt-in/out is never going to be OK with a group of FOSS advocate minded users.
Here is a link to my post ==> F40 Change Request: Privacy-preserving Telemetry for Fedora Workstation (System-Wide) - #418 by ghoultek