Richard,
Good point regarding your point 2. That was for early implementations (Jan 2005), before the configuration stabilized.
Regarding point 3, setting these parameters added stability for implementations I managed. I also have tremendous respect for Bart's competence with nsopenssl configurations. He was an early adopter of nsopenssl with OpenACS. I lack the expertise to challenge this configuration; and believe he had legitimate reasons for including these settings in his commercial deployments. I can surmise that these cache settings help SSL connections scale well, much like other cache settings within OpenACS help with scalability. Many settings in config.tcl differ from AOLserver defaults. Since you don't feel the language is confident enough, I can change it by removing the casual testimonial.
Anything else?