Ian, I'd like to encourage you to use less loaded words than "destroy." When I hear that term and disagree with your analysis, my emotional reaction is strong enough that I stop reading. Your term is loaded enough that you lose the opportunity to try and get me to think about whether you are right. If your goal is to ask us to think about your position and engage in reasoned discourse, you would be better served with more factual, less emotional statements. I understand that the emotional content is important too. I'd recommend carrying that by talking about your own emotional state rather than using emotional words about the concept. For example when I heard you describe that you were so upset you needed to leave the conversation at Debconf, I heard someone being open and honest about how much they care about the issue.
I think I may be following what Ian's saying. If we adopt Keith's proposal without updating policy 9.6--we retainIs the SHOULD have menu entries for all command line apps, but move the metadata format to .desktop, we have a number of problems. We have no way to express the category information and some of the other metadata from the trad menu that's kind of important for its expanded scope. So, it's not clear what should happen. If we revise 9.6 and adopt Keith's proposal then we're basically adopting the XDG menu's scope, but taking away the place where the broader information could go. In effect we leave menu entries that do belong on the trad menu but do not belong on the XDG menu no where. Depending on how we do things we may also significantly complicate the runtime dependencies of light-weight windowmanagers if we force them to parse .desktop files and do image conversion. In effect by adopting Keith's proposal with an update to 9.6, we're saying that as a matter of technical policy decided by the TC, there are some menu entries on the trad menu that do not belong on any menu at all. We're leaving the specifics to the individual maintainers. However, I can see that if you value the scope of the trad menu, you'd be really frustrated by that decision.