there was interest in reacting to some error conditions in a way that would be noticeable to someone with lots of topics and channels all over the place ;) so I thought this one case, where you specified both a field to require and a value, but the field wasn't present at all, but be a case where that would be appropriate.

If only a "--require-json-field" was specified, and the field isn't present, that sounds like a normal case where the message should be culled. I guess you could question whether anyone would do that - just specify --require-json-field without --require-json-value.