Tim Parenti wrote:
why didn't we refer to Minsk Time as MSK instead of FET in 2011–2014?
Because we thought that there would be a new time zone between Eastern European Time and Moscow time, one that could use a name. If that had happened stably, we could have extended the European naming tradition (WET, CET, MET, EET) one time zone to the east. It turns out that we were wrong; sorry.
the large distance between the areas covered by Pacific Standard Time and Pitcairn Standard Time make this very different
They are not different if one excludes political considerations and focuses on timekeeping considerations, which is what we ought to do here. And there are other examples involving nearby countries sharing abbreviations, e.g., Iraq sharing "AST" with Saudi Arabia, even though Iraq is not in Arabia.