Kevin,
It's a fair point, many collectors and folks in the know will clip blooms to try and save rosettes and avoid stray seedlings showing up in their cultivar plantings, and it'd be hard to deny that especially once a bloom has died and gone crispy, it becomes thoroughly ugly. However in my nursery tours, and at my friends yards, I've seen layman become fascinated by the blooms. My comments; "it's just gonna die by Fall" usually don't deter this enthusiasm. I've seen nursery customers pinking the 4x4 with "the one that's sticking up" a few times now. While I acknowledge the bloom will always be second to the rosette in value, I think it's worth acknowledging the fascinations of the layman, who doesn't know that colors will look better in the spring and who hasn't become numb to the mystery of a rising bloom stalk. May as well throw some fireworks for them if you can. In the case of 'Lady of Fire' we have a situation where breeding for a red bloom wouldn't be mutually exclusive from breeding for a brilliant red rosette as I can tell the color is transferring onto the bloom from the rest of the plant, much like the way your purples can get a purple tinge to the petals and on their sepals, and you weren't even trying to select for that! You just wanted to select for extraordinarily dark plants and wound up with near purple flowers by accident! This is the sort of thing that may just happen naturally over time to hybrids with highly advanced color depth. In the wild, colors provided little to no benefit, but in the garden they are a chief point of selection, who knows what continuing these beautifications might lead to by association.
-Sol
