@jrose as the topic's author you can include a poll panel in the initial post like here. it won't automatically lead to anything material but at least you'd immediately know what people think about it, and maybe that would make this change successful compared to the previous attempts. make sure you make it clear that this change is supposed to happen in all cases (structs/enums, classes, local variables, implicitly unwrapped optionals).
ps. it would still be a -1 from me for the reasons i stated above.
pps. i feel the majority of the votes would be positive, perhaps 80/20
ppps. i would be more happy to lose on this one should the majority decide this is the way to go and should there be enough motivation to make the actual fix.