We're moving away from that strict chronology. And it's worth waiting, to appear under an article in a magazine.

Think of this from the relay operator’s perspective as well. You care less about immediately releasing someone else's content and more about filtering out bots and weird stuff, but there may be new people writing interesting content worth spreading around. If they do it often enough, you’ll eventually whitelist their npub. But if there’s no grey middle ground, you’re forced to choose between allowing by default (and risking the spread of awful content) or blacklisting by default (and creating a bubble). Another way to look at it is the GitHub-like PR model: send enough helpful PRs and you may eventually gain write privileges my repo. IMO, this is a fair middle ground for moderation. I agree with you that this should be mentioned somewhere to make users aware that their notes might remain in limbo for a while...Maybe via NIP-11. As for making sure operators don’t simply forget about notes, maybe daily reminder emails? That’s what Mastodon offers.

I just want to see replies from strangers, without letting them use the relay to send material that would get me in trouble. Maybe I never 'release' their notes. How bad would it be? All of their followers will still see their reply (posted to their outbox as well as my inbox). Only my followers would not see it. Unless of course I wanted to reply to it, in which case I would release it and reply.