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This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

Of course it shouldn't. No facts should be surprising, but they are. So what do you do about it? You either fix peoples' expectations to match reality, or you fix reality to match peoples' expectations.

Considering that the expectations here seem pretty reasonable, I'd personally rather the latter.

"Fixing reality" is mathematically impossible. Not all people and groups of people can be given their choice of a unique name in a single global namespace. You can define different conflict resolution schemes, but there will be conflicts and there will be losers and there will be people who think the losers should have won (not least of which, the losers themselves) regardless of what you do.

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