For the question of whether merging / and usr is good:

It would be good except that rh pushes doing it backwards and debian
seems to be falling for that insanity, too.

/usr was intended for home directories. Hense usEr.

/usr/bin and /usr/lib were created only because disks were small.

Disks, not partitions.

Since they no long are, and since linux went with /home for home dirs,
/usr should be eliminated.

*Everything* currently in /usr should instead be in /.

That is the only reasonable, rational and ethical way to merge them.

The default prefix should be /local and the default prefix used by
distributions should be /. /opt/package should remain for non-src
stuff.

But the string '/usr' should never appear in any pathname.

-JimC
-- 
James Cloos <cloos@???>         OpenPGP: 0x997A9F17ED7DAEA6