While I esteem Marc's work highly, I have to say that his message above is incomplete and tendentious. He links to SRFI 150, written by him, in which he links to a message by Alex Shinn (R7RS-small editor and Chibi implementer) in support of this view. This is a single message in the thread < https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scheme-reports-wg2/oKuhgwaM45w>. Reading the thread makes it clear that Alex and Marc are on the hygienic side, Will Clinger on the non-hygienic side, and there is no agreement about what the R7RS-small voters and editors intended, and indeed a reasonable suspicion that they were talking past one another.
I have no axe to grind here. I am a fairly heavy user of R7RS-small records, but I use them only in SRFI 9 compatible ways: that is, in the global scope and without attempting to generate them using macros. So I don't care personally how the answer comes out. The difference really starts to bite when you add inheritance, however. I consider the two positions unlikely to be reconciled, and I think inheritance of records is fairly unimportant as a feature (google for "inheritance considered harmful" for arguments), so I have not placed the question on the R7RS-large agenda at < https://bitbucket.org/cowan/r7rs-wg1-infra/src/default/ColorDockets.md>, though if enough people request it I will do so.
