VTP clients send VLAN updates. Did you know that?
I had a VTP server and client in the same VTP domain, and, when I cabled up the trunk, the client overwrote the VLAN database on the server.
The moral of the story is that the best revision number will win no matter what the operating mode of the switch.
You should look at VTP version 3. This problem is solved in VTP version 3 and you can also distribute VLAN’s above VLAN ID 1024.
I haven’t dug into VTPv3 yet. But I will say that I go with VTP transparent mode pretty much my default. You need it for certain things (like private VLANs I believe), and the annoying behavior from VTP clients as you mentioned make transparent mode a safe choice…not the most convenient, but safe from my perspective.
Unless you have 83024989 switches all in the same VTP domain, one should probably just stay with transparent. After all, the new Cisco network models want to keep the VLANs locally significant, so propagating a VLAN elsewhere is no longer the way to go. I would guess VTP would be dead soon.