Axel-
Nobody has to be asked individually about anything. If you don't speak up in a debate, your opinion doesn't count.
Isn't it interesting that when there is a vote, people always try to get everyone's attention by putting a notice on talk pages, the Village Pump, mailing lists etc. (cf. the recent "years in titles" vote) -- and when there's a "consensus" discussion they always try to avoid drawing too much attention to it, knowing intuitively that the more people there are participating, the less likely the discussion will ever get anywhere?
There are people who deliberately use the nickname feature to display their name in the charset of their mother tongue, or for a number of personal reasons. These people obviously like the feature, and most of them are probably not on this list. Hiding this discussion from them and then suddenly disabling or changing the feature is exactly the kind of undemocratic back room decision that alienates users in communities. I for one intend to make users who change their nicknames aware of this discussion.
Regards,
Erik