Am I totally off base in thinking that distributing the fingerprint in the same way as the public key is close to totally pointless?

Well, in many cases, people will be checking the key in several different places for extra assurance that it is correct. Including the fingerprint just saves them a calculation. I suppose you have a point that the fingerprints could all match, and be unrelated to the key being posted, but then I'd only be cheating myself.