This is what I've been wondering here, as well. So far, the downsides (Change to an almost subconscious muscle-memory-task, added friction) of this are pretty apparent - what even are the upsides of this?

I use Emacs, mostly for Org Mode, but not registers. I also understand perfectly the problem, and I also can't understand the upside.

The only clue I see is in the polite objection the author quotes who writes "I agree it's safer..."

But I don't understand safer in what way or why 1 person gets to decide safer=better=forced.

Attracting new users for with the old behaviour is too complex maybe?

The new behavior doesn't make me want to invest effort in learning registers. A notification in the status bar which register just got filled would be all I want.

I believe Mozilla has been successful with a similar strategy.

Isn't named registers an advanced enough feature that it shouldn't be optimized for new users?

Yeah, sure. People tried for years to extract the reasoning behind Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 changes and still no one has any idea.

Almost as it's just and only petty power trips.

The “or maybe not?” part of the message you are replying to, tells me that someone got told.

Gnome developers gave pretty thorough reasons why they made certain changes in UI and code design, or was I hallucinating that period of my life? I mean, just because one doesn't like designers' choices doesn't equate to "couldn't extract reasoning". Also, it's their project, and I hate that they ignored the user community it still fell under their authority to do it and let users decide if they would tolerate it or move to a different windowing system. Personally I just moved back to KDE and have stayed there, other than very limited resource systems where I use lxde or just straight terminal+tmux.

I imagine it's that reading user input through something other than the minibuffer is annoying, because if you have customized your input/editing keys, read-key generally won't reflect that.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38592984