without it how would we prevent users from buying immediately before the scheduled dividend then selling immediately after?
I wouldn't even try to prevent that. Happens all the time in traditional stock markets. A well-functioning market will take the sharedrop into account during price discovery.
It'd be great to offer the option though, since we want long term asset holders (at least for MPA) and we want to discourage 'yield-harvesting' that similarly troubled 'socialized-yield'.