If I understand you correctly you say that doing a 'SELECT DisplayName FROM Users' is so much faster than 'SELECT FirstName,LastName FROM Users' that it must be mandatory?

I would very much like the option to disable it as it confuses my users a whole lot more than it helps them. I understand that another argument would be for backwards compatibility, but shouldn't it be up to the system integrators to decide if they want this or not? Well, it does bring up an other issue on how rule-bound mod development is. This is the part where you'll have to excuse me as I am clearly treading into unknown territory (yet) aka mod development... bear with me... Aren't there guidelines that give the developers directions on what to use and what not to? If it is a field kept for compatibility reasons I see no reason to keep it as a mandatory field. If a module tries to access a non-existant field a proper error handling process should be in place to handle that and allow the integrators to circuimvent that requirement if at all possible.