But if there is a (much narrower) subset of auto-censored words in all map strings, then that isn't necessarily so bad.
I'll answer your question with a question: why the hell
would there be [a narrower subset of auto-censored words in all map strings]?
I thought I already made that clear.
It seems that Blizzard's primary concern with censoring is to stop people spamming the game creation list with offensive map names/descriptions, hence these are auto-censored and have a very unforgiving match list (kill, transport and blow up are all banned).
But, outside of that, once you're in a game, words like kill, transport and blow up are free to use wherever you want by default, unless you're being deliberately offensive with them, in which case manual censorship would remove the map.
Look at it this way, what has a higher chance of offending lots of people:
1. A map called "I'm gonna rape your butt" that shows up on the game list whether you join it or not
2. A map, that once you join, says "I'm gonna rape your butt"
Clearly #2 will only apply to the small subset of people that join the game, whereas #1 applies to everyone that looks at it on the game list. Hence why auto-censoring game names/descriptions is the correct thing to do - the alternative is to have ALL submitted maps sit in a queue for Blizzard to manually approve before they can play. You could then be in the situation where if you submit your map for publication late on Friday night, that it isn't approved for distribution by Blizzard until midday Monday when they get a chance for someone to come in an check the hundreds of maps that had been published over the weekend. But by having an auto-censor in place, they can let you publish your map right away, and manually censoring the in-game map strings can be done later at Blizzard's convenience without a high chance of offending many people even if there really was something offensive in the map. Also pure offensive spam maps are unlikely to be repeatedly hosted on b.net, so wide distribution of a map containing offensive map strings is unlikely, especially as it's really got a pretty low pay-off for someone who was deliberately trying to do this (too much effort for minimal reward, vs offensive map names that are low effort with higher reward).
Now, put in that context, I think Blizzard's decision makes more sense. I still really don't agree with the level of filtering they are doing, especially with substrings like butt in butterfly and colours and country names, but on the assumption that there is no *auto-censoring* of in-game map strings, I really don't think it's as bad as people are trying to make out.
None.