Yeah, it's kinda sad or at least annoying to me when Apple creates the problem and then "solves" it for me by taking away functionality. They essentially invented the no-user-serviceable-battery concept, or at least proved its tolerability by the masses.
It would pretty obviously be easy to add a wizard that prepares the iPad to be repurposed as a stationary home hub, setting the battery to be held at 50% and neither charged nor discharged, sending a notification to your phone if it's unplugged, choosing a slideshow to double as a digital frame, etc. But to be fair to Apple, no other companies would build such a thing either, it's just the consumption oriented system we live in.
Even if the iPad recognizes it's always plugged in and discharges from 100 to 80 occasionally, it's still a use case that increases the chance of battery swelling.
I don't mean this as "Apple knows best, psh, silly customer" but a bit of "that's one reason this exists" and a bit of being annoyed that you can't run tablets battery-less off AC to prevent it.