Thanks for the pointers, Simon. I appologize for coming to this quite so late... I didn't realize the global impact of this feature.
>From a "meaning" perspective, I'm agnostic on the default.
From a "engineering" perspective, I want a default that "does a good enough, reasonably safe thing" if programmers ignore the feature.
The later is subtle as there are different vantage points for different developers. In the Platform, we have many libraries that we are encouraging both end-programmers, and other library authors to make use of and depend on extensively. This means those libraries have to work for both programmers that are ignoring the feature, and those that use it. In that later case, there is the even more subtle distinction of those that use the feature for their own code, and those that use it in libraries they make available.
The later case is issue: It seems a real mess if a library author who wanted to use the new feature, had to circumvent a HP library because it didn't annotate. Similar thought experiment: What would be the downside if containers didn't annotate? Would that just make the feature unusable because everything uses containers?
To put it more directly: with the satus-quo default of representations, what is the down side if a library, a widely used library, doesn't bother to annotate? What would be the loss if containers didn't annotate? (I know it did, this is the thought experiment... because I've got 30+ libraries in HP that are in this boat.)