Yeah, I agree the inconsistency in site settings is part of the problem. But fixing that doesn’t necessarily mean keeping the existing everyone group in use for site settings.
I don’t think the 2013 argument tells us much beyond how long everyone has existed for category permissions. A ton of stuff has changed in Discourse since 2013; for example many site settings used to be trust level based, now they are group based. Nobody is disputing that it makes sense in that context, and category permissions are unchanged by this work (at least, for now). Its age doesn’t establish that it has a consistent meaning across the rest of Discourse, or that we should keep it indefinitely.
Even if we agree that every divergence from the original meaning was a mistake, we still have to deal with how those settings actually behave on existing sites. We can’t safely change their interpretation to include anonymous users just because that would better match the original category behaviour. As I explained above, keeping a universal group with a consistent meaning would still require auditing and migrating those uses. It’s an alternative design, but it doesn’t avoid the difficult part of this work.
On the RFC point, having a community RFC before making changes like this would be slow and prohibitive, though feedback is welcome, that’s what the upcoming change system is for. This topic has already led to several improvements from Moin’s examples, and I’ve acknowledged the theme/component cases I missed initially and fixed them too.
I’m happy to keep working through concrete issues with the change, but I’m still going ahead with the two explicit groups. Making public access convenient to select in the UI seems a reasonable way to address the extra clicking, but I don’t think it’s necessary right this second to implement.
Anyway I still have a ton of work tracked in The road to stable, then permanent, for granular_anonymous_and_logged_in_groups_permissions for this, so this is a while off, as is any changes to do with the category system, which retains everyone for the time being. Categories are likely going to move to a system we are calling ACLs, which kanban already uses:
