* There are always gray areas in applying a design guide, that's not a good argument for consolidation. Whether a particular URL should be a link or a button is often tricky, but we still have buttons.
* Users not understanding the design is no argument for consolidation, I bet users get an 'D' at best on Material and every other human interest guideline.
I like Trevor's idea that Constructive makes something. Maybe that's why the Special:Search button is progressive, or maybe the argument was it leads to something else. And the way progressive buttons in the middle of a dialog shift to a constructive button at the [Let's Roll!] stage is a great UX thing. And Green for Thanks, because in an unfriendly often toxic "community" it's a nice Constructive thing to do, is a happy byproduct of the naming conventions. That's at least three uses that go away if we consolidate Constructive and Progressive.
Trevor wrote
> the interface is really loud and confusing because it's blasted with
giant bright colored squares on otherwise very light white and gray
controls
"Confusing" doesn't follow at all from your aesthetic response to the design. As I type this I'm "blasted with a giant bright colored [Send] square", but I think Google knows what it's doing. There are many ways to tamp down the Skittles appearance of the MediaWiki UI and the style guide [1] is clear: "Under no circumstance should an interface display more that one
Primary button colored with
Intention." If Quiet and Neutral aren't sufficient Shahyar prototyped at least two more excellent ideas (I can't find the link right now...)
If any clarification comes out of this discussion, the
http://livingstyleguide.wmflabs.org [2] should be our one and only guideline. It can acknowledge grey areas without getting bogged down in details. Maybe it can have footnotes or
§ links to Solomonic appendices on edge cases.