My two cents:
If there's a fallback option, and if the user selects it, they
shouldn't end up in an unambiguous state. Right now we're seeing
systems hanging. I'd rather see a crash than a hang where the user
can't get to a shell, and sees no useful information on the screen
that tells them why they're hung up; or even generically that "by now
you should see a login screen and if you don't we've faceplanted
somewhere, sorry".
Maybe split the criterion:
Basic criterion: installation media must have a basic video boot entry
that uses the accepted fallback boot parameter(s), e.g. nomodeset. The
criterion just means the media must have the menu entry, and that it
passes something intentional for this purpose as a boot parameter.
Sounds good.
Final criterion: installation media's basic video boot entry should
either work (we get a successful graphical boot), or it should
faceplant in some unambiguous way.
I'd rather require it to just work. Based on Ajax's response that the code path is here to stay and they still need to support it because of VMs and fresh new graphics cards.