...players.

That's pretty much it. Even as people write about how in their view QL should be changed to make it easier to get into (don't turn this into that thread though), they use the old code names for maps instead of the newer actual name names. I realize it probably happens instinctively, but I don't see any way in which you can defend using them in any context that potentially involves players who never played Q3 and never got used to them. That's everyone who came around since 8 years ago! There is no game that I can think of where the maps primarily go by names like "dm3, dm6, Tourney1" other than the Quake series.

If you can think of any argument for why new players should have to jump those legacy hoops, feel free to respond to this. You CAN say "it's shorter", but that doesn't really cut it. There IS such a thing as an abbreviation. "dm7" is not an abbreviation. "aero" IS an abbreviation. "aero" is good. "aero" is fine.

There's a huge difference between when you old-timers first got into the game and kept seeing the code names over and over and now. I'm sure when you select "dm3" from the map list a hundred times you're going to have no problem forever associating it with that map. New players don't have that.

While I'm at it I wanted to see what kinds of short forms I could come up with for various typical maps that people play. In fact it looks like if you systematically just take the first 4-5 characters from every map's name, you generally already distinguish them all (all the most important ones). Tell me you don't get what maps these are:

Blood
Camp
Furi
Lost
Vert

I'm sure there's a few more maps that ppl sometimes use code names for but that gives you the idea.