Agreed. Anything other than 200 is going to require special case handling by the server. How else would it know whether it's serving up the default index? You c

Agreed. Anything other than 200 is going to require special case handling by the server. How else would it know whether it's serving up the default index? You could add a .htaccess (or equivalent) rule but that increases the likelihood of somebody forgetting to remove it.