This was brought up again in one of these very long threads in the cafe that have happened 2-3 times now. Last time when this came up in October, I offered to submit it to the core libraries committee for review as the previous time it had come up it was fairly contentious, and I opted to abstain from expressing an opinion for or against due to my role in the previous proposal.
I submitted it to
core-libraries-committee@haskell.org. They reviewed it, and came down 4 in favor, 2 not commenting, after a bit of a bikeshedding discussion the existing name was picked, and the scope was declared limited to just putting it in Data.Function, and not including it in Prelude.
We decided to wait until 7.10 to put it in since at the time 7.8 was happening "any day now". Now it has happened, so when the topic popped up again it was just a matter of implementing an existing resoution.
I do, however, agree the discussion of submitting it should have happened on the libraries mailing list.
-Edward Kmett
-Edward