So, what I would really like is if next to "ignore" there was a less drastic option that only added them to my ignore list temporarily (say for 10 days),
Someone might be willing to make a userscript that keeps track of when users are added to your ignore list, and will automatically remove them after x time.
If users started to regularly "hush" each other for low-quality posts then a useful per-user statistic "H" might be the following:
H = (T / P) ** (1 - S)
Where:
T = The number of times this user was hushed in the previous activity window.
P = The number of times this user could potentially have been hushed in the previous activity window.
S = A severity/harshness control between 0 and 1.
In the past, the forum had implemented a feature in which the "ignore" button was more prominent if a certain threshold of people added the person to their ignore list. The problem with this type of feature is that it is trivial to spam the system via fake/bot accounts. Even if a merit or rank threshold were to be required for the score to be impacted, it is very difficult to enforce the reason that someone "hushes" a person.