I think translucency is mostly whacky because it's typically represented by a single alpha channel, and a tint is represented by a color added on top. Which is

I think translucency is mostly whacky because it's typically represented by a single alpha channel, and a tint is represented by a color added on top. Which is not how most transparent materials look like. I think we could do better, even in RGB by treating translucency as a 3x3 matrix instead of a single alpha scalar. Per-channel transparency could be represented by a diagonal matrix, but there is no reason that the current RGB basis would be adequate for representing transparent materials, hence the generalization to a 3x3 matrix. Then a tint wouldn't need to be defined additively, a green tinted glass could simply not let most of red and blue through.