I agree.  But I feel that people have taken the opportunity to grind those axes, in part, because of confusion over what the status quo actually is.  As far as I'm aware, we currently match ISO 3166-1 with very few (albeit contentious) exceptions.  Is that correct?

Since we can't possibly get the entire world to agree on a single standard for this political aspect of the data, perhaps we'd be better served by instead using some (minimal) threshold of agreement amongst multiple standards?  Or perhaps not.  Frankly, I can see such an arrangement potentially creating more issues than it solves.

Either way, I feel we should consider solidifying what our standard(s) are going forward, perhaps even putting it in an official document like an RFC, and then making sure our data matches.  Currently, Theory only says we use ISO 3166-1 to "help decide", which opens the door to lots of the arguments we've seen in recent months.

Regardless of what we pick, some people will inevitably not like it (that won't be anything new), but at least we'd be able to point to something that says "this is how we've chosen to do things."