I still struggle to get my head around whatever it was that was destructive. I tried clearing the filename field on some test files, and nothing happened.
Clearing, I believe never caused it. Whitespace, or any "invalid path", was the problem. They've since added some kind of protection for this to the [Filename] field, but as Brian pointed out earlier, this doesn't apply to [Filename (name)]. You can test it now if you want. Select a file you don't care about (or have a backup for), open [Filename (name)] in Tag AW and edit it. Type a space and Enter.
In 13 years of using MC, I never bumped into an issue with how things used to be. If, after all that time, someone found an issue, then, imo 
, that issue should have been addressed rather than take away something unique to MC's outside-the-box way of doing some things.
As I said above, my issues weren't even with just this particularly grievous example. But I've made other dumb mistakes because of this over the years. Many of them, deleting huge swaths of metadata accidentally. Or, somewhat worse, changing things. Its all fine if you notice that you've done it when you do it. That's, as was said, fine and you can usually back out of it somewhat unscathed.
But I've had it happen a time or two, not to [Filename], when I didn't even
notice it happening. I remember one specific instance where I somehow changed the [Episode] tag on a huge swath of my TV Episodes to the output of a Counter(). If I remember correctly, there were a bunch of Movies and Home Videos that got whacked too, because that's how I eventually noticed it. The thing was, I didn't notice it for a few weeks. It didn't apply to any of the Series I happened to be actively watching at the time. It did apply to a huge swath of "new" files, but it
didn't apply to any of the "newest" stuff that was recorded after the "incident" (it wasn't "ongoing"), so I also didn't notice it in my "new media" Views. Those files had scrolled down past my "notice" from some big import that happened in the interim.
I was able to restore a good portion of them with the metadata from the filesystem. But the rest, which was
hundreds of files, were recordings dumped in my M:\Recordings folder, which hadn't yet had a RMCF preset applied to them, and there was no simple way to get the [Episode] tag back on those. I eventually resorted to pulling up TVDB in a web browser and MC on the other monitor, looking for Episode Titles in the Season listings, Series-by-Series, and dragging episodes around in a Playlist to get them in the right order, and then applying =Counter() to them to get them back in shape. I could have restored a Library Backup (and considered it) but naturally, I'd done a bunch of view and smartlist work in the interim, and some big imports that (mentioned above) that required their own big tagging job.
Looking back afterwards, I
think I know what happened. I do clearly remember posting on Interact, around the timeframe when the issue seemed to have occurred, about using the Counter() function to tag things. So, I suspect what happened was some version of:
* I had MC open in the background and was posting on Interact trying to help someone. MC was "largely forgotten" and I was just using it to refer back and forth and provide concrete examples in my post. It was, almost certainly, sitting open on my New Video import management view (based on what happened).
* I was pasting some expression copied from the Wiki, I believe, or another post maybe, into a post.
* Somehow (an errant mouse-click, some kind of crazy fumbled keyboard shortcut, or just clumsy) I got MC pulled into the foreground when I didn't think it was, and the [Episode] field highlighted in the Tag AW. I know I had the Tag AW open because I'd previously been referring to it and copy-pasting out of it into my post. But I didn't really see it was in the foreground. It was over on the side in another monitor. Anyway...
* Paste. Nothing. Huh. That's weird, it didn't paste. I thought I had it on my clipboard. Click on Firefox to copy it again from the other tab. Paste. Ahh, there it goes. All good. Save.
And MC was happily writing tag changes to 1200 files in the background over there on the side.
Maybe not. Maybe it was some other crazy mistake. But, the point remains that it would have been far less likely to happen to a huge set of files if MC didn't behave in this odd and unexpected way.
I only post this as an illustration that focusing on the one [Filename] example misses the point. Destroying data is really, really bad. Particularly when it can do so in a way that is:
* Counter to the way basically all other applications behave.
* Counter to the way MC itself behaves in other situations.
* Swift and silent.
* Sometimes, difficult to reverse (especially as a side effect of being swift and silent).
I feel fairly strongly that at the very least, it
must show the files as selected when they're selected. But, pretty obviously they thought of that when it was first designed. It was a tradeoff to do it the way it worked all along, because it would look
terrible to highlight the whole file listing
every single time you refilter a View with the panes! That's why they don't
show as selected, because it'd look all highlighted blue all the time! So it "implicitly" selects them all, until you select a file explicitly.
I get it. Totally get why it is handy. I've
used it a ton over the years, and understood how it worked. Still, despite understanding it, filtering a view (in my brain) is logically distinct from the action of selecting files (and most of the time, I did the Control-A out of habit anyway). But, to me that relatively minor productivity gain is not worth one
single occurrence of anything like the above, no matter
what field it happens to trash. And, while I only encountered impacts as severe as the one described above a time or two (that one and the time I
did delete files and trash a whole bunch of content are the ones that stand out in my memory), based on "weird and unexplained" tagging issues I've seen over the years, I bet it has happened to me 7 or 10 times in one way or another over the past decade. That's me. What about people who don't live on Interact and have no idea what just happened?
If they want to add a non-default option, especially in light of how long-standing the behavior has been, I'm
absolutely not voting against that. But, since we're discussing it, I wondered if there was some kind of undiscovered third way. That's all. I don't have any brilliant ideas right now, though, if the Shift-Control-A idea isn't doing it for you.
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