Patrick, your approach seems to be a good way to constrain students so your reporting can be accurate. A bit like the tail wagging the dog, if you ask me, but I understand this systemic influence.
We treat any class with the possibility of 50% or more online participation as “distance courses” – new this year. I’m not sure how my university will report this data, but I expect they’ll count all students as distance students for reporting purposes. So we’ll likely be overcounting a bit.
Until our reporting requirements change to adapt to HyFlex, I think there will always be something compromised, either student flexibility (your approach it seems) or reporting accuracy (likely our approach). Which is worse? 🙂