Yes, there are many ways you can work around the problem of ssh needing manual inspection of individual host keys, and the method you propose is pretty reasonable. But building the verification into the infrastructure is a very sensible and nice way of handling it, and lets everyone throw out their individual ad-hoc solutions to this problem.
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You could store the signatures on one server, and import them in bulk. Then you still just need to write down the one signature.
Yes, there are many ways you can work around the problem of ssh needing manual inspection of individual host keys, and the method you propose is pretty reasonable. But building the verification into the infrastructure is a very sensible and nice way of handling it, and lets everyone throw out their individual ad-hoc solutions to this problem.