Google never should've tried to be "polite" about G+. It's only bit them in the ass and become a repeatedly-broken promise.
The intent here is reasonable: They have dozens of services with dozens of comment engines and user-systems and they need to consolidate that crap into something more coherent. Picasa/YouTube do functionally similar services but one uses video and one uses pictures, so it makes sense for Google to try to make their common-ground more common.
The problem is that fundamentally, G+ was too opinionated and Google leadership was too polite. The relationship should've been the other way around - G+ needed to be more flexible (better support for anonymous/pseudonymous posting) while Google should've moved decisively instead of soft-peddling it so many times and breaking promises to the users that implied that they had a choice about these changes. You can't not-have Plus.
What they should've offered is "I don't want a Plus homepage" and "I don't want to participate in Circles" which is an agreement they could have honoured.
That would be not a problem if they didn't enforce to be REAL id. Although as I changed my first and second names to random characters, they at first suspended my account "until I fix it", but after some time removed suspension and now I am someone whose name starts with small letter, than capital, then some more random letters and few numbers.
Can't you create a Page to use as a pseudonym? I admit the whole UI for Pages is clumsy and inconsistent, but the feature exists. You can wrap your Real ID with a layer of anonymity using a Page, as is the default approach for YouTube (allowing YouTube commenters to keep their old handles).
But in general, it seems clumsy and not very well thought-out or designed. A feature meant for allowing company websites is hacked into pseudonyms.
I hadn't heard that - my understanding was the problem was that G+ elevated the pseudonymous trolls too high in the ranking - because they're part of the G+ "culture", G+ treats them and their upvoters as popular power-users and gives them premium placement.
But either way, in any other general-purpose comment-engine, the host of the channel/blog/page/whatever would be able to allow/deny anonymous or pseudonymous users. AFAIK, all YouTube allows is whether you want to allow or deny comments in general.
The intent here is reasonable: They have dozens of services with dozens of comment engines and user-systems and they need to consolidate that crap into something more coherent. Picasa/YouTube do functionally similar services but one uses video and one uses pictures, so it makes sense for Google to try to make their common-ground more common.
The problem is that fundamentally, G+ was too opinionated and Google leadership was too polite. The relationship should've been the other way around - G+ needed to be more flexible (better support for anonymous/pseudonymous posting) while Google should've moved decisively instead of soft-peddling it so many times and breaking promises to the users that implied that they had a choice about these changes. You can't not-have Plus.
What they should've offered is "I don't want a Plus homepage" and "I don't want to participate in Circles" which is an agreement they could have honoured.