So for you, the length of a polypeptide is independent of its function. Of course, eliminating the stop codon in any existing cell would cause immediate catastrophic failure of the system. However, that fact can be disregarded because in your view, it would be unwarranted to hold (even provisionally) that function would be adversely impacted if every protein was transcribed all the way to the end of the chain, or to some other random length. In other words, if a protein functions at 200 aa’s in length, there is no reason to believe that adding several thousand extra amino acids to it would cause a problem. And again, for you, the alternative assumption that adding these extra amino acids would have no impact is clearly the warranted view.
Moreover, this assumption changes everything.
Because the function of protein is assumed to be independent of its length, the system now does not operate in one of the ways it is presented to, and it can probably now be safely assumed that the other physical requirements of the system are unnecessary as well.
I believe you may be onto something Ben. The notion that cells need a method to terminate protein synthesis is completely unwarranted folly.