[CQ-Contest] Signal report

[Al Lorona]

What is the purpose of the signal report in the exchange for the ARRL 160m contest?
 
That is the question posed by my 10-year-old son after he wandered into the shack as I began operating last weekend and noticed that my logging software always automatically filled in the RST as '599'.
 
Poor guy. He stood thinking about it for a long time, then finally he said, "Dad, that's like answering '10' every time someone asked you how old you were, no matter how old you were, even if you were an old man!"
 
A few contacts later, he said, "Dad, you could barely hear that guy, but you sent him a 5NN. That's lying!"
 
If we are reasonable and fair-minded we must finally face facts and eliminate the farce that is RST exchanges in contests.
 
If we are going to require sending a literal '5NN' as part of the exchange, couldn't we at least use those kilowatt-hours consumed by our radios and amplifiers to send something halfway useful? Even a piece of trivia such as your name, a serial number, or the temperature in the shack is less futile than '5NN'. Or eliminate it from the exchange entirely, no?
 
Even Field Day has it over the ARRL 160 in this regard. And it's not even an official contest.
 
Apparently, the movers and shakers of the contesting world all read this reflector... maybe they will be persuaded to make contests such as these more sensible to future contesters like my son.
 
If you are not in favor of replacing '5NN' with something arguably more 'useful', why not?
 
If you are in favor of keeping the RST as part of the exchange, how would you feel about a contester who got on the ARRL 160 and actually started sending realistic RST reports like '439', '569', and so forth? My guess is that that would irk most contesters-- but don't let me put words in your mouth. (I presume this only because it seems that for any issue raised here, consensus always dictates the best practice during a contest, and the sending of realistic signal reports seems to me to be so far out of the norm that it would disrupt the flow in the same way that many other idiosyncratic operating procedures, additions, omissions, etc., have been deemed to do the same in recent posts.)
 
Thanks very much for reading.
 
Al  W6LX
5NN LAX