If you were to enumerate the number of times people were confused when they saw the speedcubing form of a parity algorithm in lowercase letters versus how many people used it for reconstructions, you can't deny the possibility that it was simply more trouble than it was worth as far as confusion is concerned.
Actually let me just post my reply in this here thread instead.
I don't think I've ever seen all that many people confused when I write my algs in SiGN, but I also go out of my way to minimise ambiguity whenever there's a risk of confusion (when talking about any topic, cubing or not) so maybe that's not the best yardstick.
If, for the purposes of doing patterns, you want to be able to write slice moves a bit more succinctly, then power to you if you prefer Singmaster / old WCA notation. For speedsolving purposes (cough cough look at the URL), however, there's a bit of a catch-22: nobody cares about algs because Singmaster notation sucks, and nobody cares about notation because nobody is interested in learning algs that look like crap! SiGN is how we can break out of this. This is why I'm so insistent on SiGN.
If tools like alg.cubing.net start supporting multiple notations, my fear is that, in exchange for some convenience (for a group of people largely disjoint from speedsolvers!), this introduces more ambiguity. Not on the software side (that's easy; just store everything internally in one format and convert on input/display), but in how cubers will interact with the software. Like you say, people already don't click on links; even if you provide a link to a hypothetical future version of a.c.n that supports multiple notations, it's impossible to tell at a glance what the alg is supposed to mean. Whereas now, it's basically guaranteed to be SiGN, because that's the only notation supported by the two big virtual cubes (a.c.n and CubeDB).
Maybe I'm overthinking this and it probably will be a net positive to allow different notations. It certainly would help with maintaining the parity page if the conversions are done automatically!
(Also you keep saying "old WCA notation" but like, old WCA notation doesn't have lowercase m/e/s; that's an alg.cubing.net invention. One that I disagree with, for the record. I'm sure you remember better than I do when alg.cubing.net pulled the rug out from under everyone when it suddenly changed its interpretation of the MESmes moves. (which is to say, I don't "remember" it because I don't think I was around when that happened?))
(edit: wow my memory is really failing me; the parity page doesn't use lowercase m/e/s except in the alg.cubing.net links)
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