I don't think anyone would disagree with your overview of SMS Shell Management.
You are right, its never a bad thing to write down what when wrong and how you corrected it. It is wrong, however, to force operators to "come up" with issues just to populate a database.
As BPF pointed out - and I have seen myself countless times - it is a numbers game. If you do not have an identified proactive or reactive faults, then your system is at fault - it could not possibly be that there was a period where no one had anything to report because they were - eek - doing their jobs correctly and safely.
SMS will begin to work when the regulator stops this idea that the more the merrier (among other things).
I'd rather have one incident report with a good quality corrective action that actually works and people agree with than 10 corrective actions to 10 incidents which only band-aid the issue.