The main point of my question is that if a switch, flag etc could be added to the system, then the site-wide behavior could be extended to whoever wanted the variant behavior to work with their dotWhatever.
dotLRN, dotWRK, and dotProject community behaviors are not mutually exclusive, but installation (or subsite) specific.
The community behavior in question, for example, may be something valued in nondotLRN environments too. Why not extend openacs? Isn't that the point of puting dotLRN back into openacs?