I think we both agree that stability is an issue. I'm only taking issue with the 'code only' crowd who are claiming that it's just as easy to SELECT an object v

I think we both agree that stability is an issue. I'm only taking issue with the 'code only' crowd who are claiming that it's just as easy to SELECT an object via code as with a mouse. It is not. In fact depending on the contextual information the GUI is able to obtain when the user clicks it is probably possible in many cases to ensure better stability than code only. Again look at how OnShape records user selection via mouse click. It not only tries to record path information but also the 3D location of the click. Thus if the path lookup fails there is a fallback. The actual recorded data is quite unwieldy but as it is computer generated this is fine. As you point out the "topological naming problem" is not guaranteed to be solvable under feature tree changes. However it can be often solved with heuristics that can be collected by an agent from analysing what the user clicked on and trying to figure out what makes that click unique. It's not 100% reliable but it is hard to do better or faster if you are hand coding a more than trivial part.