@grayson I appreciate a lot your consistently insightful comments. I especially appreciate your (and all the other commenter’s) commitment to be empathetic in your answers. It’s not a simple matter to discuss these things, while keeping the other side in mind.
I can live with beeminder as is. But I want to be able to use it as I see fit. I want to be in power over my own usage as much as plausibility permits.
Interesting that it sounds that way. I use beeminder much more as a commitment device, though. I guess, that allowing myself to very rarely skip a seven day wait if it makes sense to me and then add to that my impassioned arguments for allowing this must make it look different. My point really just ist: I’m committed to use this tool as prescribed by Beeminder itself, but sometimes I know better for myself (aside: you might be interested to check out a thread in which I try to argue for the relative harmlessness of fake data). 
Hehe. Nice try. My workaround for this particular situation was to ask support to do the thing that I couldn’t directly. I want the stings, I want pledges and I want an often times conservative but still motivating road slope. I know you say that this would be asking for an exception to the rules. Again: Exception from whose rules? Mine? Beeminder’s? If it’s the latter we discussed this already: I have never accepted the premise of a hard horizon. So it cannot be my rules which are circumvented here. But since I’m in power… well, you know the rest. 
I will say that I like your inventive idea of zero-slope goals. I might have to try those out in an appropriate context.