IMO if the seasoning isn't good enough to handle my abuse, then it isn't good enough to be on the pan.

This is true, and something that I discovered myself recently. I tried babying one of my cast iron pans for while, seasoning with flaxseed oil, avoiding metal utensils, and only cleaning with a damp sponge or paper towel. I built up a seasoning quickly, but it was incredibly brittle, and actually began flaking off into my food. I haven't used that pan since, haven't gotten around to stripping and reasoning it.

Since then I've had the same mindset as you to great success: if this layer of seasoning can't handle my abuse now, then it's not fit to be the foundation for the next layer of seasoning. I almost exclusively use metal utensils now, clean with a copper scratch pad, and ditched the hard-but-brittle flax seed oil for whatever I happened to be cooking with. Don't get me wrong, I'm not aggressive with the pan, I let the weight of the utensil or pad do all the work, but I'm not letting weak seasoning get seasoned over. If it's weak enough that the copper pad takes it off, then it wasn't a good seasoning anyway.