For now I need them, I will however most likely (as suggested by Ahmet Arslan), create another boolean field to get rid of them, just simply due to the fact that I am switching to Solr 1.4 frange queries.
On the topic of frange queries, is there a way to simulate the date range wildcards here? They don't seem to be working for the frange. > Do you really need the *:* stuff in the date range subqueries? That > may add to the execution time.