[Russell Sobie]

If "wheels_out" lists the number of wheels you CAN have out BEFORE penalty, then I'm pretty sure it is set to two for SRS servers, as going more than 2 wheels is what causes qualifying lap invalidation. If you are saying that 2 wheels out should incur a penalty, then that's a different discussion entirely.

However, that doesn't really matter here, as you can go all 4 wheels out of bounds here and get no penalty and your lap counts in Q, so that leads me to believe it is the track's data and not the server settings that allow people to look like they can't see where the paint ends on this track.

You are tip-towing into "scrub/anti-scrub" territory insofar as the rules of the game are concerned. While I agree with you for games like fighting games or FPS or what have you, sim racing is a bit of a different monster, especially given that AC doesn't have the best penalty system in the whole world.

If you don't drive to the limits allowed then you are shooting yourself in the foot for no reason, anything below the limits as allowed ingame is just your own arbitrary idea of track limits and you cant expect others to conform to them.

That's backwards. What is arbitrary is the actual limits allowed because they don't match the painted white lines. What I expect others to do is just stay between the white lines (2 wheels on at least) and what I don't expect people to HAVE to do is do a bunch of experimentation to find out where the level designer happened to draw the lines "under the hood" that will cause a time penalty or not. 

The "reason" people are shooting them selves in the foot is because, by most accounts, keeping 2 wheels in bounds is supposed to be required, otherwise you are out of bounds and would normally get some sort of penalty in a real race. Since we are left with the horrible "slow down below 35kph or for 10 seconds in the middle of the racing line and cause a giant pile up" version of live penalties in AC it is not surprising that level designers are pretty lenient in their drawing where the penalties are enforced. 

Imagine the nightmare that lap 1 turn 1 would be at RBR if everyone that had to go a bit off track to avoid first turn wrecking and were all given AC's "slow down" penalty. Every race would be a lap 1 pile up... not just every other one like it is now.

Edit: Something I just remembered is that on tracks like Donington where they are notorious for having out of bounds borders drastically different from the painted lines, would you argue that you should be "driving the limit" there as well? Because that would mean turing right at the chicane and skipping the entire last part of the track since the track allows it.