If we are talking about specialized behavior for nsfw I think that should go into a different topic so as to not get us off track of the more general changes proposed.
My primary use case is for fostering an environment that is favorable to our senior members who are interested in having valuable high level dialogues with each other, but aren’t interested in new user questions. A common example would be “What kind of reptile is this” #identification, and there are at least a handful of basic questions like this. So if they can’t hard-mute the tags then mute just doesn’t work, and I have to create many “user user” subcategories categories. In addition, with a few lines of plugin code, the system could auto tag topics with tl1 and they could ignore posts from an entire group. More on that here.
In Information Retrieval terms, if you want precision, you hard mute. If you want recall, you soft mute. The quick fix is a global setting that suits your forum.