I'd be interested to read the "noise" you're talking about, but it sounds exactly like noise. Your gut judgement is right that market timing is counterproductive and it's also psychologically weird to think one can time the TIPS market and not the markets of one's other asset classes.
I hold VIPSX as 10% of my portfolio. I'll buy/sell it to maintain that allocation, but I don't time the market on any of my holdings, including TIPS. Maybe some more experienced investors can weigh in here about how they change their asset allocations based on some factors I don't understand...
One example is Larry Swedroe's book
The Only Guide To Alternative Investments You'll Ever Need. In it he describes a strategy of buying and selling TIPS according to current yields, and altering the duration of individual TIPS based on those yields. If yields fall below a certain threshold (I think it's 1.5%), then you would get out of TIPS altogether.
While Larry says there is "nothing wrong" with buying and holding
and rebalancing TIPS, he believes that a disciplined active strategy will result in superior returns. How "superior" these returns will be is anyone's guess, and the time and effort cost required to implement this active strategy is another unknown.
However, I'm beginning to wonder if maybe there is
some validity in this view. For example, if we had to rebalance TIPS (VIPSX) in our portfolio right now by purchasing more, we would essentially be buying high, as TIPS are currently expensive and low-yielding. This is exactly the opposite of what we want to be doing (buying low, selling high). So in some circumstances rebalancing TIPS may not always work to our advantage, like it does with other asset classes.
I'm relatively new to investing, so my speculations could be totally wrong.