Yes, that’s correct. There are some options for vendor zones to work differently (IPv6 support, filtering certain servers, etc) that I’ve been working on adding.
The original intention was to have a way to protect the rest of the pool from vendors with poorly behaved devices.
However it turns out that the vendors who follow the process to sign up for a zone generally are thoughtful about all this (more or less; part of the process is often to talk to them about how to use the pool appropriately). This means in reality it’s more likely that during problems what we can do is protect the people who went through the process from whoever else is doing something stupid.
Anyway, yes – that’s the point: be able to help vendors better manage how they use the pool and give us a few more tools to manage the overall load.
For example during the event a couple years ago when an app developer put some terrible NTP code into their app and put huge load on a few country zones, we could mitigate by having those zones work differently. Having the vendor zones have also helped get some vendors to fix their code so they wouldn’t poll at the top of the hour, etc (which is still a big problem, but mostly on the “default” zone names).
Some of the next updates to the site will be to make the vendor zone setup a bit more sophisticated (and more automated!) which will make it more possible to proceed with other changes (IPv6 support, a more nuanced scoring system, etc).