All things considered, I would’ve been unambivalently fond of expressing direction for the Strawberry option ahead of time. Without expressing a wilfulness to skew votes majorly, although it’s perhaps the only way for evil to accidentally hit a protected player without completely uncoordinating in public, it’d also provide a threat to not be checked early on which means the Neapolitan mightn’t be wasted on polarising slots too soon.
For the most part, however, this is a moot point as a majority of the game will be vanilla led. Evils would never openly claim to choose vanilla ahead of time if they were at risk of being checked, and attempting to wrangle everybody’s actions — whilst perhaps optimal — will only lead to dissent and ruin, as evils either continue to protest and so they are executed in turn without the night check at all, or the coordinator themselves or just the players themselves lock in Chocolate selections readily to save themselves. The worst case scenario would be Mafia killing and nullifying the Neapolitan in one fell swoop immediately tonight, before claiming it themselves in F5 or so.
The mechanically optimal outcome would include having one player go Chocolate, and then being checked the following night every time, then. Tutuu’s convinced me, donezo.