The purpose of the test suite's pedantic mode is to avoid skipping tests that have tricky setup and so are often unavailable to end users. At present, we turn on pedantic mode by default for developers and CI. However, the diversity of essential test environments has grown. We now have: 1. Developer boxen. 2. GitHub Actions CI, where we have full control but it's not an HPC environment. 3. Internal CI testing, which is HPC but we do not have full control. A simple on/off pedantic mode can't cover all of these. And, we've begin to grow tests that are conditional on being in one or the other CI environments. So, we need to re-think this.