Because unless you also say the normative name it confuses and puts off those who love music but don’t have a degree in theory.
Wait, who has a degree in theory? Not me.
I disagree, but we’re probably never going to agree: for me, I’m fine with a degree of poetry in an instrument. The titles of modes are labels, not explicators, in the original O_C design; and that’s partly the intent of the creator. Instrument design isn’t objective - or at least, I increasingly don’t think it should be. It’s OK (and inevitable) to leave traces of yourself in the things you make). And - I like to be left to discover my own understanding of a control or output once I’ve got a a rough idea of what’s going on.
I also understand why some people dislike this or what it sets them on edge. I’m just pushing back a little, and I know that when I wrote this I was also pushing back at things that @naxuu absolutely wasn’t getting at but that rile me within parts of the wider synth community. So you know, lesson to be learned about responding grumpy.
I increasingly cleave away from the just tell me what it does school of panel labelling and description because they act as much as limiters as they do enablers. “Chord”, for instance, is a hugely loaded term - it implies simultaneous notes, it implies a kind of harmony, and yet you can use three linked outputs that move in a sequence in other ways, and if I don’t use the c-word to describe it you might explore ideas beyond chords faster. (I don’t think being totally obtuse is good either, but there are reasons to be vaguer rather than cryptic, I guess.).
“Accessibility” isn’t objective either - “neo-Riemannian transformation algorithms” may feel offputting, but for some musicians, so’s me saying ‘cycle of fifths’ or ‘minor 7th’, terms I feel are pretty well understood at even an intuitive level by many. As I get older I’m trying - and it’s hard - to encompass and empathise with approaches to music that aren’t my own, which are wider and more diverse than I could imagine. It’s definitely a terrain where one person’s “simple” is not the same as another’s; I’m always surprised to discover what people encompass easily and what they bounce off.
But like I said, I don’t think we’ll agree on this point. I just sometimes like asking “have you considered why a human who designed a thing might have chosen that?” when someone reacts strongly to a thing.
As it stands: I like the decision they made - don’t rename the modes by default (because that’s the creators’ intent), offer a user a config option to change it (because it’s a request that doesn’t exactly harm anybody), everybody’s happy-ish.
