I don’t know if this is what @NicolSpies was thinking about, but to answer the question as to
then I can see that being able to use a field other than the Name field as the ‘primary key’ allows a user to see different information in places where currently only the name shows (e.g. when using search or when trying to find the correct entity to link to in a relation).
As a concrete example, the issue recently discussed:
The user could create a formula field that concatenates Product + Release and then define this as the ‘primary key’.
Of course, this particular problem will be solved when the Name field can contain a formula (which I know is in the works) but I can imagine other similar scenarios.
FWIW I think Coda allows the user to choose which field is the display name for an entity, so I guess they think this is useful for some of their users.
As I said though, I don’t know if this is what the original question related to, since I have no real idea what is referred to when saying