The above sounds good to me.
We already have the “aliasing” in place via the last note to -devel from Brian Coca, via git symlinks, if we need to rename a module, and can prefix a 1.8+ module with “_” in the tree to make it appear deprecated.
We’ll have docs.ansible.com showing this very soon.
And +1000 to cleaner and more consistent interfaces.
I suspect we’ll carry the deprecated modules for some time, though this will also make it readily obvious for new users what to use.
Namespacing is also a REALLY good idea, as right now when things from 12 different clouds all intermix, it’s hard to see what your capabilities are on cloud Y or Z.
I am also thinking we may teach ansible to support “subcategories” in the lists by another layer of directories soon, but even if we do that, the namespacing of the module names should still continue.