The easiest thing is to do simply ask, “do you mind if I put my bags in the locker above row 1 instead of the crew bags?” Trust me, the crew will do as you ask. This would avoid a confrontational and negative start to a flight. Leaving bags in the aisle or creating a drama out of a simple act of a bag in a locker above your seat really isn’t a great start to a flight. We’re not there trying to deliberately annoy you.
I personally always ask my crew to leave their bags at the back of Club for this exact reason, but there has been no official communication to crew to avoid doing this even though it may well be a common sense move.

Er ........ yes.

There is no rule regarding crew not being allowed to stow their bags above any particular row as much as it may be a sensible consideration. Overhead locker space is not reserved for the person sitting underneath that locker. I also fly full fare in a club and as much as I like my luggage to be above my seat, it’s not the biggest hardship if it isn’t. The plight is no different for row 1 than for someone sitting in row 4 who has to stow their roller case above row 5 or 6.

Like I said in my earlier post, just ask the crew if there is ever an issue for you.

On a a side note, in over 14 as crew I’ve never had to offload baggage to the hold because of lack of space in the lockers and when we are stuck for space in Euro/World Traveller, it’s always the lockers in a club that have space and save bags being offloaded.

On a related note, a good practice that I see some cabin crew employ is to proactively close all the CE lockers before boarding commences; this makes it less likely that someone in ET just dumps their bags there on the way down the aisle. Similarly, LH have clear signage to the effect that the front lockers are reserved for their business class customers. When I am in row 1 and board early, after having put my (small laptop) bag overhead, I always make a point of closing the locker, thus saving the space for the other passengers up front.

That said, if I do have to put my small bag above row 2 or 3, I’ve never had a problem getting someone to pass it up after landing or politely asking to squeeze through to get it myself, even when I’m in 1A or 1F.

No HBO fares in CE (yet), so this shouldn’t be an issue for row 1. On the more general point of your suggestion for ET, although I would be a prime candidate in willingness to pay a bit more to go guaranteed HBO, overall I’m probably in the minority. The key driver for HBO fares was reducing the headline fare on price comparison sites, so charging more is a bit of a non-starter commercially, added to which the general public wouldn’t really “get” the idea of paying more not to be allowed a checked bag.

I had had a conversation about this subject with a CC recently. I’m usually in CE, mostly row 1, but on this occasion I was in ET, and there were crew bags above the exit row seats, effectively the same problem. I asked, out of interest rather than any storage issue for me, why they were put there. The answer was, as suggested by a poster above, around ease of access. This was MF crew, she said that it was necessary to access shoes and hat for changes at the start and end of flight (on an A321, so a crew seat by the exit row). Something that obviously affects female CC particularly, and reasonable enough, though in CE, putting the crew bags at the back of the cabin (assuming that doesn’t cover an exit row...) would make sense.