It's not always negative like you're assuming it to be.

Actually, your Deflate-gate example was a perfect example of the conversation being negatively changed because of flair. And we saw it play out that a lot of conversations were fucked up because of flair. Now, I think the positives of showing your fandom outweigh the negatives, but that's because of the personalization aspect of it that you are specifically opposing.

And if you're looking into like that, you can spend an extra second hovering over their name if you don't know that the red standing Buffalo or the hiking Pat represents Buffalo and the Patriots.

If I'm talking to your about a subject regarding the Dolphins, it's pretty damn important to know you're talking to a Dolphins fan.

Not really, you shouldn't discount something /u/jaguargator9 says about the Dolphins simply because he's got a Jaguar next to his logo. I could keep going, but I don't want to call out a bunch of users that know about their teams. And going further, there's a lot of Dolphins fans that don't know shit about the Dolphins, so you probably shouldn't assume that logo means that I know about the Dolphins. This is true of all teams. Judge the content of their posts, not the color of their logo!

If you honestly believe flair has no impact on conversation, I'm not sure what to tell you.

Um, I seem to be saying quite the opposite. I'm not sure how you got this from what I've said.

IDK what to say. You want flair, so that the flair impacts things in a positive way, but only if we dumb it down so that people too stupid or lazy to know that the red Buffalo means the Bills can do so. Those seem counter to each other.