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Given the importance of zero in mathematics to simplify a lot of things (see Roman numerals), my intuition is that affine types are much more flexible without losing the nice properties of linear types?

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What kind of guarantees do you want from your type system? Strictly speaking the only guarantee that linear types give you is that every single linear value will be consumed at some point, which generally means that no resources ever get "leaked". If the idea of accidentally leaking a resource is unacceptable to you then you might find that affine types are too flexible, as languages that implement affine types generally give you some way to leak a value.

In practice I don't know if anyone is overly concerned about this. While Rust doesn't have linear types, I find you have to bend over backwards to introduce a situation where you might accidentally leak a resource.

Tarean makes a good point with respect to fusion, but "guaranteeing" fusion requires additional assistance from the compiler in addition to the basic implementation of linear types.

I never quite got the finer points but apparently affine types are great if you want to manage sharing in the presence of mutability and linear types are great if you want to guarantee fusion.

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