I think the question is more one of how much does this really enhance the security. In some cases such as where permissions were changed from the default, they provided little to no real value and merely hampered things like rpm -V. If the security provided is significant I think we can all agree its worth the pain.
Well, yes. This is largely about use-case / role of the system. There may even be difference between whether we expect hashes to agree or simply for permissions to agree (comprehensively via rpm).
Here is some of my perspective on the matter. There are very few files on RHEL where tighter-than-default permissions provide value, and Red Hat has historically been receptive to tightening such permissions (when we've asked and also had a sane case for doing so). Every once in a blue moon something might get packaged with goofy permissions, but that's what bugzilla is for, and not something you'd ask every admin to check for all the time. (In fact, the checks against certain directories or the whole filesystem are what tends to reveal any such oddities, so I strongly support these.)
This is a good topic for a future discussion or documentation on the wiki as a matter of establishing a common perspective. As I mentioned, I believe there is good value in global or directory-wide permissions checks (especially when they are linked to a requirements for files of a certain class). However, the only files that I believe should be called out for inspection on an individual basis are those which contain account or credential information (or are otherwise singularly important, such as those which control boot parameters). If any other files are to be called out for individual inspection from the 200,000 or so files on the system (which are all important, and arguably equally so), there must be some kind of criteria similar to those I've just mentioned. I do not want a body of guidance that is 30% a random selection of file permissions checks based on no particular criteria.
To Spencer's point (with which I also agree), we are trying to satisfy two use cases. For general-purpose systems I think it's a reasonable expectation that rpm -V complete successfully. For specialized systems that are fulfilling roles with particular security requirements, integrity checking may depend more strongly on aide or strong change controls, and it's probably not reasonable to expect rpm verification (of hashes) to succeed.
Always in my mind is concern about creation of baselines that draws from configurations designed for a specialized system and tries to apply them to a general purpose system and creates senseless misery. However, careful consideration of a system's role when creating Profiles should help address this.