I voted yes. I have seen several people use the prestige/Warden-overtaking tactic as a way to troll/grief/‘pseudo-PvP’ (and my settlement is currently dealing with one), and it has always resulted in the targets seriously thinking about quitting, or actually quitting, because this game has been designed and portrayed as a coop game rather than PvP, and when people can use the mechanics of the game to grief other people and try to ruin their enjoyment of the game, for their own amusement, you lose players.
The three potential pseudo-PVP tactics as I’m aware are (1) blocking/preventing expansion (somewhat dealt with by the Code of Conduct, thank you devs), (2) overtaking the Warden position to suddenly change the name/identity of a settlement [still allowed, I think Warden should be purely a figurehead with no abilities; if they want to name a settlement, let them create their own instead of taking over someone else’s (unless the owner leaves/quits); changing this would make Warden competitions more friendly, I think], (3) auto-merging of settlements, which this change would try to prevent, unless both parties were wanting to merge.
Some suggestions:
(a) I agree the buffer should be limited, no more than 2-3 max, I think otherwise it may cause more trouble than it solves; also, I would like to know if this will include suddenly-deplotted ‘internal’ plots; e.g., a player quits or forgets to feed their beacon; I think it should protect those, at least to the size of the buffer; I have seen several troll-y players swoop in suddenly when settlement owners were offline or unaware, and take over a plot in the middle of a settlement, and use it to grief the settlement inhabitants;
(b) if a wild plot would be ‘protected’ normally, but there is a claimed plot by another settlement between the wild plot and the settlement that would be protecting it, that plot remains an unprotected wild plot. This would prevent overlapping roads, prevent total envelopment of a smaller settlements (unless the larger settlement deliberately expanded around it to prevent expansion, which could be referred to the Code of Conduct),
© I think it would solve a number of potential issues if, instead of, or in addition to turning the protection entirely off, the owner of a settlement could use a de-protection plotter to remove protection from a specific plot, in order to let another player/settlement plot it.