Sorry Jeff, but you just shot yourself in the foot!
If you transmit a dead carrier and you don't say anything you are in fact violating the Part 97! All you people did was reaffirm what I had already said. The sad fact is that we give out licenses like lolly pops at a barber shop with no real instruction involved and once a person gets a license they automatically think that they don't need to know the rules or anything that they learned to pass the exam to get the license.
Had we had real Elmer's when we gave out those licenses, we wouldn't have 90% of the garbage we hear today on the HF radio!

As far as amplifiers goes, yes I can see someone using a amplifier on 160 meters in the summertime, but the rest of the time, all they are doing is broadcasting - not really serving any purpose.
If the OP bought a commercial OCFD in the first place - he wouldn't have these problems.

The people that made comments about their OCFD out performing a center cut dipole for X frequency doesn't understand how a OCFD works.
If you have a 80m OCFD and you use it on 10 meters, it acts like a 8 wavelength long 10m dipole. You actually get a realization of GAIN from the OCFD when you use it on 40 or 20 or 10m...

Unfortunately in my book to realize gain you must give up something in one direction to improve your signal in another. So the term GAIN really isn't relevant here. Instead of using the term GAIN I should say improvement, because improvement would be a more relative term.