Yeah, most of CSI Humboldt's work is what Observe & Report described, filling a room with elite clones and pollinating them with reversed elite female pollen. That stuff has it's place but it's never interested me. It seems they only do open pollination for preservation projects of IBL'S and the like. They don't use s1's for that stuff.
My interest in open pollination is purely academic. I have zero experience doing open pollination, I just like to learn about it. But, The concept behind open pollination is that plants that carry bad traits, like hermy traits like you mentioned, or bad structure or whatever, may also carry good traits and by culling those individuals you're throwing the baby out with the bath water so to speak.
By open pollinating for a few generations you capture all of the potential gene pool, good and bad, and mix them all together so that all or most individuals contain all, or most, of the genetics contained within that gene pool. By mixing everything together before you start pulling parts of the gene pool out you can essentially uncouple good gene traits from undesirable individual plants and embed them into the general population. And then you can then start culling the plants that express bad gene traits without fear of inadvertently eliminating parts of the gene pool you might have wanted to preserve.
You would of course be breeding into the population undesirable traits too which like you said would need to be breed out, likely over several generations. So it's definitely not the most direct way to get to a specific breeding goal. It takes more work but in the end though, in theory, you would end up with a strain that has more of it's gene pool intact. You limit yourself less going forward.
Again this is all just from what I've read I have never had the opportunity to try to breed that way. It would take probably twice as long to achieve a stable breeding population via open pollination compared to standard breeding practices. But, it interests me because of the lack of genetic diversity amongst the majority of the consumer market.
Is this how I would do a breeding project? Probably not, I don't have the time or space in my current situation.
Good work skink#1, it's folks like you that keep cannabis culture alive, thank you!
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