I wonder if it isn't down to different people's perceptions of the situation.
Some people appear to see the cluster as existing in a sort of cold-war situation where people from opposite sides can sit in Rick's bar in Casablanca and make snide comments at each other. "Public" in this case means Rick will let them in, and he'll let in pretty much anyone. German or French, Jewish or Czech.
Some people seem to think it's more like the Battle of Britain, where pilots gather together in "public" bars and encounter only people who are not actively at war with them. Occasionally, Douglas Bader gets shot down and invited to dinner with Adolf Galland, but it's really not a regular occurance, and anyway, that's just until tomorrow when he gets carted off to a POW camp.
I think it's also affected by how pilots see themselves. Even in the hot part of the war, the German ambassador might throw a party expecting that the US ambassador and staff will show up, with lots of careful maneuvering and pumping for information, etc. If you think of your character working at that level, then maintaining contacts with "the enemy" even during wartime seems completely reasonable. If you think of your character as someone in the trenches, then you really aren't (except perhaps on Christmas day when you throw a can of christmas cake across and they throw a couple of bottles of beer and you maybe agree not to shoot at each other long enough to kick a football around).
If you think it's a 1935 cold war, then maybe the American Marines are crashing sushi parlours in Shang hai and having drinking contests with Japanese soldiers and occasional punch ups. If you think it's 1943 near Tarawa, that would be unthinkable.
The point of this rant is that there is a lot of unspoken assumptions about pod-pilots social situation, or character roles, which affects what seems reasonable. If we talked about it a bit more, maybe we'd understand the reasons for the disagreements. Sure, then we could argue about which level pod-pilots in general work at, but maybe we could also agree that different pod-pilots might operate at different levels and have different behaviours be reasonable for their positions? Or maybe different parts of the cluster are at different levels of conflict and likewise, different behaviours are reasonable or not.