Oh boy, you know you’re totally wrong.

I knew you would agree.

Friendly fire and flak vest, nice metaphors. Let’s say I would wear one just for safety.

Basically, what you’re saying is that I’ve to wear a flak vest to cover my ass from incoming. So far I agree.

Where I don’t agree is that I’ve to cover my ass from friendly fire, when there’s a way to avoid it.

I didn’t call down fire on my own position. If Google were somewhat responsible, they would have invested the little brain power necessary to come out with a better solution.

Google created the ugly mess, so Google has to fix it. As long as they don’t, I encourage you to unsubscribe from this crappy “service” (Feedburner-GA integration).

By the way, here is a canonicalization routine that deals with with Google’s UTM crap on arrival. That doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. You only have no better chance. Just because Google launches crap, that doesn’t mean that you and a gazillion of other webmasters have to fix it.

On nearly all the rest of your post, I’m sorry, I have disagree with you.

I believe it’s your responsibility as a webmaster to make sure that I can’t break your site (and/or screw up your rankings) if I link to you with an appended querystring such as this one: you (should) have complete control on which pages of your site get indexed and which won’t, which URLs should be regarded as canonical and which shouldn’t. There are plenty of tools that you can use for URL prophylaxis (that’s a nice neologism, isn’t it?): from good ole .htaccess to the rel=canonical attribute. The average Joe web developer might not feel 100% confident about the latter and how to use it, I agree, but there’s an abundance of information on the subject to help even novice webmasters –and absolutely no excuse for ignorance in senior web developers.

Ultimately, I believe it is our role and responsibility as experienced SEO professionals to provide developers with guidelines on how to design web apps so that their rankings won’t fall apart when they get linked to with slightly different URLs than they were designed to handle (I think I just wrote a recursive statement, LOL).

Total pages in Googles index is about 25,470,000,000
http://tinyurl.com/googles-index-size

So… 95,600,000 / 25,470,000,000 = 0.004% URI clutter.

There is related post about URI spam here, Omniture, Webtrends, Yahoo are all guilt of this!
Google Webmaster Support Forum