Keeping your loft from becoming overcrowded is smart. It prevents most problems in lofts, such as diseases, stress, etc.
The best way to control reproduction is to have at least two sections of your loft, where you can separate the sexes. Ideally, 3 sections is best--during breeding season you have a breeder section with nest boxes and all the pairs you want to breed, then you have a section for males and females (and if you can't fit more sections, you can keep your young birds in with the single sex birds for training). In the off season, or when you don't want breeding, you simply separate the sexes. You want to keep the young birds separate from the breeders since you don't want your breeders out flying. So this serves to solve several problems.
The other way to control reproduction, which is the way I use since I built a one section loft at a time I did not understand how important several sections are, is to use fake eggs, as you have mentioned. Yes, the birds will continue to sit on the fake eggs. I notice they give up at about the 25 day mark, and abandon the egg, and unfortunately they get right back to laying within 3-7 days.
I will seek to build a larger, multi section loft not only to solve the aforementioned problems, but to also keep the stress down. Constant laying makes the birds more sensitive to health problems, and the hens do get stressed by the cock birds constant desire to drive them. And, in the case you own an absolutely stunning bird (be it performance, looks, parenting skills or whatever), you need to understand that like humans, hen pigeons have a fixed number of eggs, and once they're used up, they're gone.
Keep one thing in mind, if you start flying your birds, you will lose some. It is sad, but just part of owning homing pigeons. One hand, you want to keep the in a cage to keep them from hawks and getting lost, yet on the other hand you want them to have their freedom.
....taking notes ....
