Finally, after some more discussions, observations and better overall understanding of the issue we were able to find a successful strategy for ARP reduction.
The result is an additional patch which introduces a generic "noflood mark" which for ARP Requests means a prevention of the DAT broadcast fallback.
At Freifunk Darmstadt, an 800 nodes setup, these two patches were tested for a month with no issues so far but a significant amount of ARP Request reduction.
More details can be found here:
https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/DAT_DHCP_Snooping
Regards, Linus