Gregory's Server@darius agreed with everything you say here, but also... this seems like a totally reasonable amount of complexity for a core feature, like "showing message notifications" is for Slack. the classic gamedev thing of having to implement a whole heap of complexity in order to approximate "common sense".
@v yeah, I agree, it's more about illustrating the compounding effect of every knob you add (sort of what I meant by "this is not bad", it's normal but can get out of control)