This would be quite the change, of course, but change Maya to no longer be name-dependent for its nodes.
It would really speed up user's workflow if we didn't have to be so concerned about manually typing in extensions to node names ("george_grp" and "george_curve").
Then for scripting, Autodesk could come up with a consistent, internal naming convention for object extensions.
So if I have a group and a curve both named "george," and say Maya's official extention for groups is "_grp" and "_crv" (or something like that), then the user just has to apply the appropriate extension types while scripting to avoid naming conflicts.
It appears Maya already has a way to internally distinguish between objects, since it assigns the appropriate icon to each object, and I've never seen that break, even if I attempt to rename everything "george."
Cheers,
Nathan
