I mucked around with my quandry a bit and came up with the following, which does seem to accomplish both goals I mention above.
However, the position divider - in this case
:: - becomes part of the following position's hyperlink. With the default skin1 font class=NavigationPath, this effectively makes the dividers the same color as the positions, (along with hover colors, etc). For the time being, I'm just going to create a new class in skin1 so I can maintain the appearance of NavigationPath in location.tpl but avoid having this appearance on hover (in this case, when hovering over category "Media Types", sans color):
Home
:: Media Types :: Books
However, this does successfully eliminate the active category from showing up (as well as its subsequent divider), in addition to eliminating a product title from showing up when viewing that product. If you might have a suggestion as to how to keep the divider from being affected in this way, please let me know.
Anyway, this is the code I ended up with, which doesn't completely disresemble a long, strandy type of pasta, IMO:
Code:
{if $location}
<FONT class="NavigationPath">
{strip}
Home
{section name=position loop=$location start=1}
{if $location[position].1 ne "" }
<A href="{$location[position].1}" class="NavigationPath">{/if}
{if not %position.last%}
::{$location[position].0}
{if $location[position].1 ne "" }</A>{/if}
{/if}
{/section}
{/strip}
</FONT>
{/if}