I don’t know about treating them as separate in this case. 

If you accept OP’s view of the event, that they were 1 BL apart, it seems crazy to blame W, all of us have been in W’s shoes in that situation, and would be horrified to be accused of not keeping clear.  However, in reality if W was a length to windward of L, they never would have hit, which is why in every other race in history a boat that far to windward has never had this issue, and why those blaming L feel so strongly, as they could see themselves being the windward boat frequently, and believe they were not risking a breach.  
If OP had started with a plausible / possible separation, like, W was 1.5m to windward of L, maybe even 2m,I think this would have been a much shorter thread. 
But I agree, that aside from this particular circumstance, a class like foiling moths could achieve maybe a similar situation to OP, but again, the answer will probably be in the specifics of the details. Which doesn’t really help us all understand exactly where rights / obligations start and stop. 

Looks nifty thanks Michael - will pass along to the Bodies here in the Philippines

Richard, thank you for your open minded response, but i agree with Sue that relaxing the promptness of the hail and RRS 44 penalty requirements would be undesirable.

One of the purposes of the suggestion was to reinforce the requirements for prompt hail and prompt response.

If you let go of those requirements you will get into all sorts of disputes about:

AIUI the purpose of making the respondent (not a word in this RRS) field mandatory is that the system automatically messages that entity that they are the subject of a hearing.  Naming a boat there will make it appear that that boat has been protested.

Wouldn't a better solution for requests fo  redress be to either omit the respondent field or make it non mandatory, and message the race committee that a request has been received in every case?

Thank you for everything that you do.