quoted

Yes, of course there should be a list of both positive and negative
tradeoffs. But I think the "overloaded" argument can be easily solved
by renaming one of the overloads.

And renaming one of a term also has costs, especially if it is one
that is in use in large amounts of documentation, both in the git man
pages, and in web pages across the web.

It's just impossible to change terms and have previous documentation
still be valid. Sure, you can list it in the "cons" section as an
argument, but it's not very convincing in itself because it applies to
pretty much any interface changes. I think the main idea is to
_improve_ the interface, which means rename things so it is more
consistent and so concepts are easier for new comers to grasp. We
could still support old terms for a while and eventually deprecate
them.

www.google.com/trends/explore#q=git%20staging%20area%2C%20git%20index&cmpt=q

I think this comparison is a bit bogus, searching for "git stage"
yields more accurate results, we can see the searches are related:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=git%20staging%20area%2C%20git%20index%2C%20git%20stage&cmpt=q

quoted

Unfortunately yes, I see many people being silly in order to win
arguments, both in the pro-changes and against-changes side of the
discussion. I'd be much simpler to simply gather arguments on some
wiki and eventually do a vote when the list is complete about the
proposed change.

Voting is not a good way to do software development.  That way lies
people wanting to whip up clueless folks using rhetoric (exhibit one:
Fox News) to "vote" and so it's not necessarily the best way to make
thoughtful decisions.  Using hard data, including possibly formal UX
experiments, is a much better way to make such decisions.

Interesting, but then who's to say which data is more important than
anothers? For example, I consider improving the interface to be more
important than having old documentation on blogs/tutorial for a while
until people catch up, but maybe you consider old documentation to be
more important... who decides what really counts? I guess it's a mix
of general consensus and old timers credibility.

Anyway, having some data as a list of pros/cons would greatly simplify
the debate.

Philippe