Thanks! Don’t get me wrong, I do find the current approach quite elegant. However, having seen so many users butcher our forms makes me cautious. Ideally some A/B testing would help, but if that is not an option I’d go for a double clue as @IvanDobsky suggests.
Agreed - if we standardised this throughout our UI, it would be a massive improvement. At the moment, so many new users would rather make up data than leave a field empty. The “if in doubt, leave it out” maxim is not really made clear to them in any meaningful way.