It’s clearly a cheat because it affects gear change schedules which only happen when you’re applying gas and in gear, not when it’s idling and parked in your driveway on a cold morning.

In P/N it wouldn’t, but this alternate mode is made available outside of those two gear choices (at least from the articles posted here it sounds like it’s available). If the intention of the steering wheel angle was to detect when the customer had begun to drive and then the mode would drop out for driveability / NVH…