While this is getting a bit off the topic of an in-bed salter,,,,
As an engineer, I cannot recommend that anyone defeat a safety device.
However, in the interest of investigating what makes snowblowers clogs I decided after the first year of using the blower (2012) to conduct an experiment to test my hypothesis that removal of that grate would improve performance. I am still gathering data and thus have not put the grate back on, but all of it so far is very consistent.
The worst clogging that I experienced before my experiment was when I would happily blow a path down the driveway, with everything working, and then tried to go through the salted heavy snow pushed up by the township plows at the end. Instant clog.
My experiment has also revealed that removal of the screen had an additional benefit of making removal of any clogs much easier. Previously, I had basically been reduced to jamming a broomstick through the grate from the front to pry some snow out the top, or from the top to force the snow down the chute and back through the impeller.
Now, a garden trowel makes short work in the rare event that a clog happens.