Quoting Russell Coker (russell@coker.com.au):
You haven't been using GRUB nearly that long.
Quite right. And I've been seriously tempted to give that piece of junk the heave-ho and go back to lilo. (On EFI, there's elilo.) It wasn't broken, and I am annoyed by distros fixing what wasn't broken. (Your mileage may differ.) That being said, I've been an utterly non-enthusiastic user of GRUB since whenever it was that Debian introduced it into d-i or boot-floppies (whichever it was) on the unstable branch. And that's a lot of years, too. Which matter aside, if GRUB somehow dissuades games of device-name Frogger, point for GRUB and your point is unclear. If not, your point is still unclear.
Also the development of libata and SATA disks are much more recent.
Yeah, you may recall I wrote the first real documentation about Linux on SATA, so you could say I did notice it at the time.
Yes things can work with direct names for the simpler cases.
Apparently, all of the reasonable cases are what you call 'simpler'.
Probably the best case for UUIDs is when using BTRFS as you have RAID, volume management, and the filesystem all combined.
Good point.