I do not see this as good, it seems to me like we are going back to pre-Trammel era and player killing which got the game to loose lots of players....
I certainly see your point and I see the sillyness of someone running though a VvV town and automatically becoming involved in the VvV battle against their will, but we would certainly be doing well to have the numbers we had back in those days... of player killing.
It wasn't the player killing the caused masses to leave the game, in fact the game grew its most substantial numbers during this period (the pre trammel era)... then peaked after the release of Trammel... and for the most part had slowly trickled down ever since. I would attribute the loss in players more so to unbalance, lack of support, bugs, scripting and the release of new online games.
It seems the reason for not allowing blues to hang around in VvV towns is that the blue players would be able to manipulate the battle without fear of being attacked by healing and supporting the VvV players, against other VvV players.
If you had two VvV players fighting, and one of those VvV players had two blues following them and healing them the whole time without being able to do anything about it, that would be exploitation of the system similar to when factions and non factions could be allied.
This is their way to preventing that.
Hang around and you are freely attackable.
Now this certainly doesn't mean that the system couldn't use some tweaking. A player should be able to easily tell whether or not they are attackable without having to log in another account, putting a char in VvV and and checking for themselves. There should be some sort of icon in the buff/debuff indication window letting you know that you are VvV attackable. Also it should wear off if you leave that town and do not perform and beneficial or negative actions against at VvV player.
In addition, the timer should be a bit longer for when you do become attackable or perhaps tie it to whether or not you have a trade quest.
The other day I was in an inactive fel VvV town. I had accepted my trade quest. Went to the middle of town to shop, and BAM, the town becomes besieged. So as soon as I got the warning gump, I immediately went to the docks, threw my boat in, and began sailing out. I then got caught in this huge array of water elementals and dolphins which seemed to all want to move directly in front of my ship blocking my every exit attempt. It definitely took longer than 30 seconds before I got out.
Now after reading above, I have no way to know whether or not I am perma-orange until I die to a VvV player as I have not yet come across one on that character to find out!
But yes the system will probably need some adjustments and we we learn those needed adjustments as this new system has a chance to sit in place for a while and issues get reported to the Dev team. This is a brand new thing never tried before so of course there will be hitches to overcome.
Posting these experiences like we are now is the way to attain that needed attention for any necessary fixes.