How can I set Potential Customer field?

I saw the Potential Customer on a view and added to my Opportunity form in order to test out the logic.

However, now I cannot remove it from the form and it appears to no longer default to the Account or Contact. I cannot make it optional either.

I found this article, and unfortunately this is exactly the situation that has occured. Pity I didn't read this article before adding it to the form.

https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/crmandunifiedservicedesk/archive/2015/12/09/opportunity-potential-customer

I tried the following:

1) I've created a business rule to set the Potential Customer to equal the Account if Account contains data. This works well.

2) I plan to set visible=no on the form so it is not displayed to users on the form. It's not possible to remove from the form.

3) However, now I will need to make Account a required field on the Opportunity and will need to make Company Name required on the Lead so that Account is always populated when qualifying a Lead. This is less than ideal.

Are there any other solutions for making this an optional field?