I think the answer to your question is that most of us find the very idea of filterware distasteful (let alone the generally poor quality of the implementations. However, that's much the same as I find american cars distasteful. If somebody else wants to blow their money on one of those pieces of crap, by all means let them. (I admit, they're slowly getting better) This leads us to poke fun at the current systems and argue against people actually using them, much the same way a christian friend of mine keeps trying to get me to accept jesus into my heart and love him so that I won't go to hell. On the other hand, we get really pissed off when somebody tries to force us and our kids to use this crap. It doesn't matter if it is AOL or the FBI, outside coercion is outside coercion.
Or public school districts, which are arms of the government regardless of the fact that many of them have the word "independant" in their name and have a quasi-independant regulatory joke known as a "school board." Strangely enough I'm taxed to provide Internet feeds in the schools, then taxed to censor those feeds, then bitched at for not "thinking about the children" when I post to USENET, then threatened with government regulation for the same. All while the public school system is turning out people who can't read or do basic mathematics. And we still come back to the old question: Who determines what is "suitable for children?" Since I, for instance, consider absolutely no material to be "inappropriate for children" on basis of their age and I absolutely deplore censorship in all its forms I would rate everything as "suitable for children," even if that means that I have to rate a porn page as having "no nudity," or a copy of a hack and slash novel with blood and gore all over the place as "no violence." It's blatently obvious to a human that they're walking into a porn page or a copy of The Terrorist's Handbook before they actually transfer it. Since the sole purpose of automated filtering and rating systems is to censor material which some censor decides is "inappropriate" for a particular audience without any input from that audience at all, and in many cases I'm the one paying for the network feed to begin with, screw them. And I'll put whatever I want on my pages, even if that is a ratings tag, thank you. If Little Johnny is of such fragile mentality that he will be damaged for life because he sees a penis or a breast, then he was screwed already. Think of it as evolution in action. Rate falsely and watch them load.