trackbacks and toggling them on and off

I am curious if someone can explain to me the design decision behind the preference for track-backs being on or off.

it is a related table, to each post, so the setting of ping_status = ‘open’ or ping_status = ‘closed’ only applies to that post. Toggling this setting in prefs to off, only sets it off for suture posts, turning it back on, only sets it back on for future posts.

With no way to manipulate this setting on a per post, or better yet, a global basis, it seems rather confusing, and eventually, becomes somewhat useless.

I had to turn mine off as they were getting hammered by spammers, the spammers were not getting through, but they were beating on mysql pretty hard with all the connections.

Toggling it off did me no good till I ran this:
mysql> UPDATE wp_posts
-> SET ping_status = “closed”

Then later, I wanted them back on, and had to run that again, with it set to open. Maybe there should be a maintenance pref, where you can globally set this, or even a pref on each post as well.

Anyway, its pretty easy to fix, not for the non technically SQL inclined, but I can work around it, more looking for the design logic behind this decision. Do you think I should call this a bug and report it to the tracker?