@TickTock- Using the px4users list is fine for discussions. Our users tend to be on the developer side.
The reason to send this mapping to IO is that IO does the hard override itself (and has to do it in case FMU fails). The other switches were not relevant in that case.
However, if in your new pattern the differentiation between MANUAL (direct pass-through, not obeyed on multicopters) and all other flight modes requires to look at the other variables as well, we would need to change things.