Its more an issue of the external links
Just a thought on this, but assuming that the move were
community-approved then would it be possible to do a sort of
"hard-redirect" where
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (or
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?Main_Page if you like) would
automatically shunt any incoming traffic to the new page? Isn't there
something in Apache, a 500-level code maybe that a server gives to
clients to indicate a permanent redirect so that the incoming link can
be updated? If this was the case, and since everyone agrees that moving
Main_Page is not an immediate concern but rather a long-term issue (or
not an issue at all), then Main_Page could exist for the next six months
or year as an un-editable "hard-redirect", to give the world's links
time to be updated. Then after that, once the epic novel "Main Page" has
been written and achieved verifiable notability, we can un-hard-link the
Main_Page article and editing could begin.
Right. But since we're obviously going to need such a redirect, what do we
gain from moving Main Page? It's a lot of work for...?
-Luna