I'm not conflating anything. Those details are scientifically conflated (IE, they are functionally related) in a very interesting way. For exmaple, new genes probably arise from gene or genome duplications.

DNA that doesn't encode proteins is not necessarily non-functional.

Yes, I know that. It's unclear what aspects of those duplications are "functional but not coding for genes, enhancers, promotors, or other well-known and understood coding and regulator elements", and which are "functional because if you remove it the organism dies but we can't explain what the cause is".

Everything in my terminology is entirely correct within the current mainstream understanding and it encapsulates much of the ongoing confusion about what "role" non-coding functional elements play, and how they play it.

See http://cryptogenomicon.org/encode-says-what.html and https://www.cell.com/current-biology/comments/S0960-9822(13)... for the strongest arguments against ENCODE's more wide definition of functional elements, as well as https://www.pnas.org/content/110/14/5294 and https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/MGA2_02-10.html

I am of the opinion that nearly everybody in this field is overly dogmatic in their views of how genomes work at the macro scale, and that these squabbles demonstrate that clearly.

For more context, please understand that as a researcher in this field, much of what I say may not make sense to casual readers. I decided it's better to think about minimal organisms, than ones that have 500 copies of the ribosome (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?rep=rep1&type=...)