Yes, I do prefer, and I don't see any reason why I should pretend that jimrandomh meant that when he wrote "Some types of deviations are allowed, but some aren't". In any case, it seems scarcely credible that Swimmer963 is unaware that poetry has traditionally tended to have (perhaps even by definition) a lot of metrical regularity and that many people strongly prefer it to be that way, so on your reading jimrandomh's comment seems to convey little actual information. (And what actual information there was seemed to imply that all poetry should be iambic tetrameter, which is just ridiculous.)

Also: You might want to consider the possibility that Swimmer963 (or jimrandomh or T S Eliot) might have criteria of poetic merit other than "what will gain me status". (I find that a lot of the comments here about status, signalling, etc., give me the impression that their authors haven't appreciated how indirect a lot of this stuff is. Yes, a lot of human behaviour can be explained in terms of status-seeking; that doesn't mean that the people who do those things are actually, literally, seeking status. A lot of human behaviour can be explained in terms of trying to optimize one's reproductive success, but the humans behaving in those ways are often going out of their way to avoid actual reproduction. The same goes for status.)

[EDITED to add: Those remarks about status often seem to me like very clear examples of status-seeking behaviour themselves. "See how much more sophisticated I am, seeing through what Picasso might have said about beauty or artistic integrity to the status-seeking core beneath."]