I still don't think that's accurate. My experience is that a future Expires date -- even relatively near-future -- is sufficient to prevent an If-Modified-Since request. (Which is what I think you mean by "304 request".)
The problem people are trying to solve here is that users hit the relaod button. A lot. And if you hit the reload button, that will send If-Modified-Since for everything on the page, no matter what Expires says, because the user intent is to ignore Expires headers.
That's what the immutable thing is about: indicating that even in the reload scenario the Expires is authoritative and no If-Modified-Since request should be sent.
It's up to the client to decide based on Last-Modified (if previously sent by the server) and its own implementation. But I guess browsers are going to be a tad bit aggressive especially if Last-Modified is absent. Hence the overly aggressive 304s.
