@codinghorror that seems generally true, but does not account for all of the permissions that can be set for a category. People will be scratching their heads at why they can see a topic but not reply, reply to topics but not start topics, etc. Not everyone is going to want to have totally public forums and for those with members-only categories or other site-specific rules will benefit from being able to more easily see what’s going on.
All that said, I can understand that this is not a priority for you now. Maybe it’ll come up later.