I appreciate that this particular issue is one you have to grapple with personally, but it is of a type that I come across nearly daily and I think it’s probably a better use of our time to try to establish a better common understanding of the balance between what is said and what is meant than to advocate fully detailed policies for every social interaction.
Two examples from my life:
A doctor’s office with a sign on the door saying “do not enter if you have a temperature”. I can let this slide at the barber where I know it’s an honest mistake, but at the doctor’s (and this is a doctor who would not be seeing anyone with a fever) they should know they mean fever. I enter anyway. I am mildly uncomfortable the entire time I’m there because I’ve broken the rules, even though I know they meant fever and not temperature.
A nut-free daycare classroom for 6-14 month olds. We are not a nut-free house. These kids put absolutely everything in their mouths. We do not pack anything with nuts as an ingredient. We decided “may contain” is also out, but allow “produced in a facility that also produces...”. We don’t allow our kid to eat any nuts before going to daycare in the morning, but do allow nuts and nut products on weekends and in evenings and there isn’t always a bath between then and daycare. And so on. In short, we’ve developed our own set of rules to interpret the “nut-free” policy, but they do represent some amount of burden and still may not be enough to keep a severely allergic kid safe.
These examples illustrate my point that it is very common in society to be left to interpret the true meaning of a stated rule. In example (1) I could tell they couldn’t mean it as written and could infer what they almost certainly did mean. In (2) I was left to my best judgement.
I think your point is that more places should have detailed, explicit, and reasonable policies, because there exists too many possible interpretations of the current policy some of which are too burdensome and some of which are too permissive. For something like a dance weekend or a daycare, a fuller policy could be provided in a somewhat functional format. For a single dance, a full set of rules (cologne bad, shampoo OK as long as an average person can’t smell it from 3 feet away, etc.) would quickly turn into a waiver type situation that probably 5% of people would read which doesn’t make it a particularly practical solution.
What would be better? A world in which everyone was like you and me and approached every social interaction like a new board game with its own rule book is not the world we live in. In the end it’s probably up to us to learn what we need to in order to make the burden-community wellness tradeoffs that others are perhaps able to make more instinctively.
The problem is that the folks that fail in the “didn’t do enough” direction are easier to identify and correct. The “did too much” or “saw it so big a burden they opted out entirely” direction is harder to correct for. But probably “so burdensome that no reasonable person would attend” is a clue that we’ve gone too far.
My primary thought after pondering this post for a day is that it comes from a place of immense dance privilege. That it was written from the perspective of someone who has, at least occasionally, the opportunity to dance a wide range of different levels of contra, styles of contra, etc. I will always remember the night in the Boston area c. 2010 when the caller (in my head it was Lisa Greenleaf) changed the dance mid-dance and called contra corners into a diagonal hay and the whole hall just did it without missing a beat. It felt so engaging, so sneaky, so good! Where I dance now, the only event in a year where we could possibly get away with contra corners into a diagonal hay (and only with a walk through) would be a challenging session at the annual dance weekend. Because as you say, it either takes too much time teaching to do in another context, or too high a baseline dance level. But those extra teaching minutes are worth it to get some of that shake-up, explore-the-form, push-the-limits feeling once a year.
The same situation applies to people who are constrained by something other than a smaller/more typical-level dance scene, for example people who are only comfortable dancing at queer-normative events or who get around only by public transit. It’s really nice if there’s a wide variety of options available at a dance weekend (and yes, ideally multiple tracks to facilitate this) so that we can have a few moments of that feeling.
ETA: I think the only ‘challenging’ type session I’ve ever truly disliked was the one I once attended at Flurry, which is exactly where you call out it should be OK: but I think the room (which was not even in the venue) was just too weird for the caller to gauge skill level or for anyone to be able to move comfortably.