I was just looking at all of the name change capability proposals, and one of them, Proposal #231, which goes back over a year, has well more than 500 votes with no Acknowledgement. If you combined this with the half dozen other proposals on the same subject (the newest already having over 300 votes), I think you find that it's one of the most voted upon proposals in SL. It would be nice to get some kind of response to these multiple proposals. I understand that this may be difficult to do, as there would have to be some way of changing ownerships from the old name to the new name, which I suppose could be quite cumbersome. I would be happy if adding an additional avatar to my account for the one time $9.95 fee would do the job..ie...the new avatar would share the inventory and ownership rights with the account holder name, and if this is already the case that information should be noted somewhere easier to find, then all of those name change proposals could be marked as completed and the votes returned to the residents.
I also like the "alias" proposal for allowing a first name change without changing the underlying account name, tied into the account name database to avoid duplicate names. This looks like it might be easier and quicker to accomplish than all of the updating necessary to change the property ownerships that would be required for a name change. This is discussed earlier in this forum.