Rolig, nothing to do with ' fear of unnamed bad guys' or anything so simplistic. And if i want to hide in my turtle shell...well you know thats why i rent my own private sandbox, totally closed, so as whoever raised the point of 'bumping into people' who show as offline a) i don't care b) really unlikely anyway.
There are times I want to be working on something involved with total access to my inventory (so using an alt is not an option) when I really want no interaction with the rest of the world for extended periods. Thats why I've taken to using other grids for some dev stuff - because, face it, they are more or less empty after all =^^= But not exactly an ideal solution, they just don't have the capabilities.
So comes to 2 things - if i set my prefs to show offline I want all viewers to reflect that . All of them, no exceptions. And as for the LSL functionality - hey merchant guess what, its lovely you check if i'm there and if I want to be seen then hey doubly lovely. As I've used the online check myself in products I still don't see the problem with it being fixed.Like anything in this world of ours, it all falls under the 'subject to change' banner anyway.