I completely agree. The NSFW tag is a strange sort of self censorship which i believe is the scariest of sorts. Leading people to hold back on free expression.
I have faced similar issues when deciding to use it on some of my posts. I dont want my work to not be visible to those who have the hide NSFW setting turned on by default.
Maybe we can show by the first image in our posts that people can expect nudie bits and to turn back if they are easily offended.
I personally get steemit to show me all the NSFW content so that i won't miss any great posts trying to fly under the prudes radar. Unfortunately this leads my feeds to be covered in content i don't want to see.