All I was asking was what is the difference on the body when you sit in an aeroplane at the behest of an operator, or whether you do it on your own dime?
When you do it on your own dime,
you can choose not to do it, when it is too fatiguing. While positioning is your obligation out of your work contract.
I am with PENKO on this, we have to distinguish what we have to do on behalf of the operator, and what we do in our free time. One is called positioning and rightly so included in the flight time limitations, and any other activity is private life, this can be sports, commuting, child raising, etc...
For private life there is the requirement to take aedequate measures to show up rested for duty. PENKO showed it in an easy understandable way that this is not as black and white as the paragraf nitpicking fraternity would like to see it, and we can never run the system without trust in pilots judgement.
Well now the crucial question is: are there operators out there, where pilots are homebased in A, have a week of flights in B, and proceed to B in their free time without adding this travel time into flight duty limits? That would seem against the rules in my opinion, but has cclearly nothing to do with the private choice of not living at your homebase. So let's keep these two issues separate.