That's a fallacy hohe.
You don't have to noble barbs, and you shouldn't.
You should dominate your areas through control, and focus on active player targets.
The trap that tribes fall into is believing they need to noble out every single barbarian village in order to protect themselves.
Early game, the best defense is a strong offense, the best players often backtime their way to success.
Late game is the exact same thing, the best defense is a strong offense, if your constantly harassing a players main villlages, they aren't going to make effective use of those crappy barbs, plus the reason those barbs are troublesome, is because they aren't small enough to ignore.
+1 to this idea, as long as the idea is laid out better.
I've personally suggested this numerous times on .net threads.
I envision it as in the first 3 months, barbs grow to the set size the server mandates (1000 pts, 3000 pts, whatever barbs grow to). This allows for early game farming and success.
Then after that barbs slowly fall into ruin, and demolish themselves back to 100 pts (or a very low number), which promotes farming of players, and player interaction.
This would include, any villages that became abandoned through deletion, or punishment, they would slowly degrade down to the barbarian size.
I believe attacking players is the heart & soul of the game, it's the ideals that the game was founded on, I don't believe it was ever the intention that the world would turn into whou could last the longest nobling abandoned villages. Such an idea as this would cause worlds to close faster, as there'd be less villages nobled overall, likely causing many players to play longer than they currently do now.