What are the pros and cons of changing the term “mixin”?

Question

At one point there was some discussion to change the term "mixin" to something different, such as "ring partner" or "fake out", due to the fact that mixin doesn't do a good job of describing what a ring signature is doing (its passive, whereas mixin seems active) and the fact that the "scale" of the mixin can either be 0-based or 1-based (the confusion between chain radar and other explorers calling mixins different), whereas "ring partner" and "fake out" have implicit 1 based and 0 based scales, respectively.

What are pros and cons of changing the term mixin to something else?

Answer 1

Pros:

1. Another name may lead to less confusion about what mixin means
2. Another term would help avoid confusion with active mixing, such as in Bitcoin CoinJoin transactions

Cons:

1. Mixin has been the name since the beginning of Monero and is used by all other CryptoNote based coins. For long term users a new name would take some time getting accustomed to.
2. No clear choice has (yet) been identified as the mixin term replacement (you chose 2 different ones in your question itself)