Would any electrical gurus know an elegant way to do this? I’d be willing to give up my fan HI mode if it means I can shift all fan modes up one, freeing up the lowest fan mode selection for flow mode/fan off.

I did exactly that, because the vents close in position O.
Just tape over the contact for fan speed 4 and air will be pushed in depending on your speed, exactly as you say - something I also find missing in modern cars. Or tape over 3 if you want to keep 4. Shifting the others would be harder and not really worth it.

If you place the center rotary Mode Selector Switch to the "Off" position, the blower fan motor does not run.

I get the off position but it closes vents and locks up all flow. My preferred normal driving mode is to have position selector in def or Def/feet and zero fan power, just natural air “flow”. It used to be standard, then it was optional and now it’s rare. It’s part of the pacification effort by the aliens.

If it's any consolation, this drives me nuts as well. I'd much prefer having two fully-off positions - one for the fan, and one for the HVAC blend system. This would, in theory, allow for the fan to be off but have all of the vent / floor positions available for use at speed - or to completely shut off the entire system.

Personally, I blame the reptilians. The greys aren't getting a pass on this either, but the lizards are the real problem on this one

:idea:
I have a simple solution if you want everything to function normal and keep the blower motor off.
Simply pull Blower Motor Relay out located in the Power Distribution Block in front of the Battery under the hood.
or
You could pull the No. 24 fuse in the Fuse Panel Junction Block on the left side of the dash.
------Note:Fuse 24 feeds 12v control power to the blower motor relay, but keep in mind, it also feeds 12v control power to the fuel heater relay.
---------Some say the fuel heater is almost worthless so for summertime driving, it probably would not hurt to disable it?

or
locate the ground wire for the Blower Motor Relay (terminal No. 85) A Black wire 14 gauge according to the FSM WD.
Cut the wire and wire in a simple single pole on/off switch which you could mount on dash or anywhere to your liking.
The ground side control circuit would be very, very low amperage and disabling the blower motor relay would not affect anything else...

You’re not getting it, this isn’t a desire I have for full time disable, I need a fan for sure. But I want to option to have fan off and still have flow over the selected mode. Haven’t you had a car that operated like this? It’s very important imo. Also, I realized I could add a switch but that would complicate use somewhat. What I really like is the solution provided above by gollygeemister where the highest setting fan mode is disabled and made to be off. This is much more elegant than pulling a fused a relay. The only improvement would be to rewire them so that it’s the first fan mode that is off, but I’m not sure if that’s possible. I’ll take a look and report back. The idea here being that setting 3 is plenty of fan for any time, and the highest fan mode is like tornado level and not really ever used at least not by me in all the cars I’ve ever driven which is probably 100 cars or more.

Glad you figured it out.
You can post pictures, you just have to use a picture sharing service like PostImage or one of the others listed below.


_______________________________________
Click on the IMG button on the top of your post.
[img]>Place%20your%20picture%20image%20link%20here<[/img]

some of the image hosting sites that can help you upload and share photos:
Google Photos.
Imgur. ...
Dropbox. ...
TinyPic. ...
Use. ...
Flickr. ...
500px. ...
SmugMug.

I see you didn’t mention photobucket which is telling, unless you just forgot but they are a huge service that changed the rules mid game and are responsible for murdering millions of valuable forum posts all over the world and this is what all these services do so I’m weary of them. History shows that the forums that have their own image hosting survive better in the long run with preserving content. So I don’t really do the image hosting service thing. I personally think it’s a pretty massive tragedy that all the photobucket data was made private.

Very cool thanks for that. Not sure I’ll be able to figure that out but I’ll try.