If you selected all categories to block then you were far more restrictive than the High level. 27 categories blocked is still a huge number, and its guaranteed to cause problems and require a lot of maintenance, and will likely quickly fill up your whitelist. Quite frankly, OpenDNS was never intended to be used that way, especially the free OpenDNS Home product. It has nothing to do with you not liking that some domains are appropriately categorized in multiple categories.
My statements are not just a matter of semantics. They go to how OpenDNS was designed and functions. OpenDNS by default returns results for all DNS queries unless someone has specifically blocked that domain by category or via blacklist. It in no ways "manipulates" those lookups. It also does not have to compare every single lookup against what would be a rather extensive whitelist if unchecking a category was "allowing" that category. It also means that all of the many, many domains that are not categorized will not be blocked unless they are specifically added to the blacklist. If unchecking a category was the same as "allowing it" then you would not be able to reach any of those uncategorized domains unless they were added to your whitelist since they do not belong to a category that you could "allow". There really is a huge difference between no longer blocking a category and allowing it.
It really doesn't matter how many years of experience you've had in IT related fields if you can't, or won't, grasp the fundamentals of how OpenDNS functions, and you don't seem to be grasping how it actually functions. And yes, it DOES matter how it functions, long with the words that describe it.
At this point I don't see OpenDNS making any fundamental changes to how the free product functions. It's a mature, established product, and there simply is no benefit to them in reengineering the entire product that they don't even get any income from. They certainly are not going to be adding functionality that would somehow require additional information to be sent that would allow OpenDNS to figure out who the individual user is or how old they are.
They already have various pay products that allow different filtering options, including filtering based upon specific users or groups of users. However all of them are still a blacklisting system, with whitelisting only used as exceptions to categories that are blocked. There is still no sense of "allowing" categories. They all use some form of agent to accomplish that, and there is no agent associated with OpenDNS Home. The pay products also have options for bypass accounts or codes, which are not tied to agents and can be used on their own or in conjunction with the agent.
There are also routers with LPC (Live Parental Controls) though I think the only vendor currently making them is Netgear. They leverage OpenDNS, and via their Genie software can allow a number of exceptions or bypasses.
But no it does not sound like the OpenDNS Home product is for you since you seem to be treating it as a different product from what it really is, and then being disappointed because you aren't getting the results that you want.
