I haven't found any discussion of this issue. I understand that 99% of companies will want phone/email data for their contacts, required and visible on the page. What I don't get is why Salesforce doesn't give us a choice in the matter.
For example, our users often create contacts before they have that information, and we've resorted to filling the fields with a bogus value (eg abc@xyz.com) to bypass the requirement. This in turn allows room for more potential issues/errors, like when the field update rule written for the bogus value started overriding actual email addresses entered.
I'm interested in knowing the technical reasons behind this requirement. I'm guessing it has something to do with External/Unique ID values, but it's also probably a remnant of outmoded design, like most of the BS limitations in Salesforce. If so, I want to create an Idea asking them to remove the requirement.
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OK everyone, thanks for your help! I think I was experiencing an end-of-day brainlag, because I figured it out first thing this morning.
Turns out the fields are just ordinary custom fields, that happened to be UNIVERSALLY required (via the checkbox on the field properties), as opposed to required on specific page layouts. This is why I couldn't make them unrequired within the page layout. Once I unchecked the "required" box on the field properties page, I was able to remove it from my page layouts.
