Dear all,
As one of the author of this proposal. I am, unsurprisingly, against rejecting it. Though it seems I'm rather in a minority here, let me add one last argument to try and sway the general opinion. Being understood that being an author, this argument cannot, in any way be considered as “a vote” or any such thing.
Human psychology is powerful. As it happens, we have a very strong tendency to choose whatever course of thought or action requires the least mental effort. Defaults require very little mental efforts, so we naturally will gravitate towards default. This is why, for instance, almost every Swedish worker is part of a union, while almost every French worker isn't: in Sweden, unionising is opt-out, whereas in France, it's opt-in. That's also why putting apples in front of sweet deserts in a school restaurant will result in more children eating fruits rather than cakes.
Back to our case: the overwhelming majority of Haskell packages are designed to be used unqualified (and also do almost all of their imports unqualified). Now, either unqualified import are really that much better, or the default has an enormous influence. As I previously mentioned, in Ocaml, a fairly similar language, qualified is the default, and almost every libraries are designed for qualified imports, and import their modules qualified. So I'd wager it's the default.
As a software architect, I do actually spend a bunch of my code reviews saying: you should import qualified. It would be a much more effective and powerful message to simply set the default imports as being qualified in my projects. For me, the change in this proposal would really be a very significant change.
Now, the committee may decide that this is still not worth the confusion implied by having two incompatible syntactic conventions out there. That's entirely fair! I just don't want anybody to walk out of this conversation with the feeling that this proposal is an inconsequential stylistic change.
/Arnaud