Curved text: should it taper?

This relates to an issue with Illustrator, but the expertise to answer the question lies with those who frequent this InDesign forum. The question is whether text that is placed around a circle should be tapered at all (smaller towards the center, larger further away from the center.) The Illustrator forum is where there are people who live for cruel and unusual treatment of type, just search for "distort" there.

I recently created a modified logo for a search and rescue organization with APPALACHIAN across the top and SEARCH + RESCUE in Scala Sans, which the organization chose for its official branding typeface (a nod to Bob Bringhurst and The Elements of Typographic Style). The original words were hand-drawn, the letters created using radia from the center and arcs around the center. So they tapered a bit. So the question arose, given all those nasty things that Illustrator invites you to do to unsuspecting typefaces, can Illustrator taper a typeface like this without resorting to lots of manual work? The answer is no.

But the question I'm posing is: should one desire such a taper for circular text, even a very subtle one? You can be a purist and say, "don't touch the type unless you think you're better than the designer." (In which case you might wish that Zeus strike me with a thunderbolt for even asking the question.) Or, you could say, "well, a little bit of a taper is actually like a bit of perspective, perhaps, which occurs whenever we view text at an angle, and would be OK."

What do you say?