I don't really see the benefit to removing dame-filling, to be honest. Like oren said, even in territory scoring it is easier to fill in the dame before scoring when filling in real life.
On the sensei's page, you said:
Quote:
Most would agree that the obligation to fill dame is an undesired side effect of area scoring. Simply disallowing dame plays would fix this, but is the loss of distinction between even and odd dame desirable?
First of all, in my understanding the original Chinese rules were entirely about who could get the most stones on the board. Players were theoretically suppose to fill in their entire territory with stones, leaving room for only two eyes (see http://senseis.xmp.net/?StoneScoring, which I know you already mentioned). So I dispute that filling in dame is an "undesired" or even "unintended" side effect of area scoring.
Second of all, and much more troubling to me, is where you suggest banning dame plays. Why would you ever want to ban them? How would that even be enforced? The white moves below are probably going to end up in dame, but you can't be sure. Should white be banned from playing his moves?
Plus, Go would constantly devolve into fights about what is dame and what isn't. Take, for example, a dame move that carries a non-obvious threat behind it. One player would dispute the move, saying it is illegal, and the other player would be stuck between pointing out how his move threatened something or not being allowed to play his move.
Or, take this shape below:
White must fill in all of the three middle points in order to force black to capture his stones (and yes, this still makes a difference in area scoring, because as long as there are more dame elsewhere, black would not want to play at
). However, by your rule, white would be unable to force black to do capture the stones, as all three moves would be on dame points.Overall, I think banning players from playing in dame points lacks justification, takes away from some of the elegance of Go (i.e. you can no longer play wherever you want), fixes something which isn't broken, and would have many undesirable consequences.
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