We've tried the whole "let players enforce cabal dogma" thing, and it just doesn't work. All it takes is one leader (and we seem to have had many of them) who lets piss-poor RP slide, and then you've got a problem that can only be solved by direct imm intervention.

Economics teaches us to always look at the motivations of people in these situations. Thinking about this, we can surmise that:

1) The leader is motivated not to punish his underlings, especially if he's a powergamer, because that means less power for him and his allies.

2) The imms are motivated to take a hands off approach and not punish this sort of thing if it's not totally egregious, because they don't want to ruin someone's time unless it's warranted, and they don't want to be the bad guy.

I hear you with regards to enforcing it more for Battle than other cabals, but consider the fact that Battle gets the best Cabal powers in the game. This is supposed to be a tradeoff for the many things that they give up for the sake of RP - unfortunately, too many people are trying to get away with too much for the sake of convenience or powergaming. For you to suggest that Villagers who do this won't be successful is, no offense, very naive -- I can think of at least two heavily, HEAVILY imm-rewarded current villagers who were openly in favor of using magic portals as though it's no big deal.

You say it's lazy for players to expect this sort of thing to be enforced, but the problem is that it only takes one (or a small group) of bad apples to spoil the bunch. There are just too many people who don't take the RP seriously -- hell, the other day on the newbie channel I saw someone asking about using a healer to remove a curse. Instead of talking about the RP of the situation, the overall response was more along the lines of "oh, don't worry about it, that's not tracked by the code so you can still join Battle without anyone finding out or it stopping you."

To make a long story short, there are just too many players who set the bar as low as possible for themselves. There has to be something (code-enforced, apparently) to make them behave appropriately - there's literally nothing other players can do except roll up Villagers and take people to the circle over piss-poor RP (which I've considered, but the end result of it would be that, even if I did something, it would be temporary - the kind of player who, as a villager, accepts word of recalls and goes through portals willy-nilly will just roll up a new character and participate in the exact same powergaming behavior again, maybe a little more discreetly.)