Gaile -
I suspect you only sought to undermine my overarching concerns by pointing out that two of my great-grandparents had green privacy (none had gold,) which is kind of a petty way to engage with another serious Wikitree user. But thanks for bringing it to my attention; I have since opened those profiles. As you might imagine, my perspective on these things has changed since I added my own great-grandparents to Wikitree 4 years ago and tens of thousands of profiles later.
I don't know what you mean by putting "public" in quotes, and I don't know what you mean by "that is not limited to government records." What kind of non-governmental public records are you concerned about? If they are truly public records, then that information is accessible by the general public. But regardless, green privacy doesn't hide the biography, so I don't understand.
I am sure there are ways to bifurcate biography and public data privacy if that was desirable. I don't think your statement that there is "no way" is true - whether that is overly complicated or not is a different question. One could allow the vital statistics data to be public and editable while the biography wasn't or similar, if that's your concern.
I think your statement about adding something to the biography that might be "embarassing" to the children is an interesting one, and it does get at the core of the goal of Wikitree. Is it to be a comprehensive database of genealogy information? What if grandchildren or great-grandchildren are embarrassed by an ancestor's information? What if other children, great-grandchildren or similar are proud of that information? To my thinking, the goal is to document the facts, inasmuch as we can.
Regarding "historic profiles" - I think you are talking about a special use case. I don't spend a lot of time on famous people with 10 profile managers. I'm sure that could be dealt with in a different way. I've always wondered what "Project protected" actually means, since it doesn't seem to actually protect the profile.
Rather, I spend a lot of time dealing with just regular folks who were uploaded via gedcom by someone back in 2011 with bare bones information, no changes since that time and a barely active profile manager who doesn't respond to merge requests.
Gary
P.S. - I don't often post on G2G because it's hard to invest as much time in Wikitree as I do and bring concerns / ideas here only to have people try hard to just shoot down and dismiss everything you say or go immediately to my own family to try to find inconsistencies. This isn't the first time. We're all working here in good faith on this tree, and all of our concerns deserve respectful dialogue and engagement.