In general I like John's suggestion. Org link syntax can be made to do nearly anything because it is possible to bind link actions to arbitrary elisp functions (I have used them to create buttons that run source blocks for some of my non-technical colleagues). The grouping of cross references under org-cite seems reasonable to me, and I would love it if they could handle arbitrary references, e.g. to hypothesis web annotation links or org-capture links.
Actually, having written this now, I think that both solutions have their own use cases. Org cite is clearly about providing evidence for, or a scholarly reference for something, and critically it can embed some metadata about that reference in the document as a citation or perhaps as an excerpt (and extension of what org-ref does now when the cursor is over a reference?). Regular links do not provide any way to embed metadata within the document, they are purely pointers. That being said, it seems that there are a number of use cases where org-ref links are simply internal document links that can point to an element with a specific #+name: and no embedded information about the target is needed. However, I think it would be a mistake to use up equation/eq and table/tbl or figure/fig prefixes for references that are internal to org, because it implicitly limits/collides with the #+link: keyword. Best, Tom
