I agree. Most users now use XLSForms or Build. Using "Validate" will not allow duplicated variable names and most of the data managers at the end need to manually (or with a specific manipulation post export) remove the group names for analysing the data. Ideally an option on Briefcase to export using directly the variable name instead of the long name would be really useful.
I started to advocate odkmeta recently and the option there to use the short name is great @Matthew_White, especially for Stata users. Thanks
@ggalmazor We also had a quick exchange about that couple of weeks ago on my post Feedback from trainings