Indeed. "I reject your biases in favor of my own because mine are clearly logically superior because they are mine" is equally "uncompelling". Dismissive rhetoric generally is about squishing the other people into submission to make them go away and "win" that way. (note Ben Cohen has NOT done any of that. He's doing really well. Additionally people who just say it's what they want with enthusiasm, also great! Love the joy.)
Out of curiosity, does Swift/Apple even have a budget line item for Human Factors testing of proposed changes? (I mean real broad recruitment PhD designed Human Factors testing.) I think I brought this up before.
Personal opinions about what will or will not confuse certain groups of users are just opinions. Until they are tested.
I have objections beyond readability but I think a lot of discussions on Swift proposals come down to a bunch of developers having strong opinions about what they THINK will or will not matter to different developer groups. Great. That is useful and not to be dismissed anecdotal data. Thank you for bothering to engage with the community.
I do think it would be nice if the LSG got additional input, actually collected data. Give developers of varying levels of experience actual tasks to complete with different features enabled. Record how much time it takes / what their confidence rating is / etc. Consider it an option 4 to add to the arsenal.
Human factors testing is not the be all end all. It's not always great at creating a new feature. But it can cut through feelings about what will or will not happen when certain significant changes are made. Frequently the results are surprising to all parties.
Recruitment is incredibly expensive, so batch testing proposals would likely have to be done.
I don't mind reading about other people's feeling on a topic. It's informative. But then people... go off the rails. It'd be nice to have "Thanks for your input. We'll for test that" to keep things on the road.