So, things brings me to a weird conclusion:

a) earlier you said that in WEXT, the only command that is 
defined to get you an association is the "iwconfig XXX ap YYY" 
command.

Yes, but you're assuming "YYY" is a MAC address while in fact it can
have two special meanings, "any" and "off", see the iwconfig man page.

If I accept both sentences as valid, I must conclude that 
mac80211 is faulty. It happens that mac80211 triggers an 
association to an access-point also by the "iwconfig XXX essid 
YYYY" command. This is not defined. Hey, wait a minute. mac80211 
is not allowed to do ANYTHING that is undefined, because tools 
can only rely on defined things. So mac80211 is faulty. Crap, 
ditch it.

Nope, this isn't what I said either. You've (I guess intentionally or by
just being too set into your line of thinking and not accepting any of
my arguments) managed to misunderstand me *COMPLETELY*.

You said, paraphrasing: I have a mac80211 _bug_, it's crap because it
doesn't support this use case I dug out and that happens to work with
some other drivers.

I said: It's not a bug.

You understood: Johannes hates me, he thinks mac80211 is buggy, and he
also thinks mac80211 should only do what he thinks wext defines.

See?

I wouldn't even object to making mac80211 try to associate when a key is
set, if you can make a clean enough patch (which I doubt). I do object
to calling this a bug because it's not, it's in line with what wext
users can rightfully expect.

johannes