Richard,

I think I understand your reasoning on this . . . and it's reasonable. But I'm just not sure it's completely correct, for the simple reason that my experience, and that of my sons and my wife, in indoor pools with varying levels of chlorine (0.5 - 30 ppm) with ZERO stabilizer, is not completely consistent with your theory.

Put simply, our experience is that chlorine with minimal organics (fewer swimmers per gallon, no lotion, + 80 F.) is not very irritating, even at levels high enough to turn hair from brown to ash colored. It DOES dry the skin. But with high organic &/or nitrogen loads (lots of swimmers, pee, sweat, & lotion + 87 F.), even low levels are irritating (dry skin + itch + red rash). And the particular pool my wife worked in for 10 years remained irritating. I even tried using 10 ppm of CYA once -- probably 15 years ago, now. My sons were mostly in large pools with few swimmers. My wife was in a small pool with many swimmers, and had to coat her skin with lotion before entering to keep the problems manageable.

So, while your explanation is both plausible and reasonable, it's not completely consistent with our experience. Unfortunately, careful confirmatory research on this topic would be really, really hard.