I didn't start the thing where "x" is used to notate an unknown- maybe we should blame my 6th Grade Math teacher
While I certainly see your point as well as sympathize with those (like me) who get confused with nomenclature, it's always made clear on posts, threads, and pages regarding firmware updates and changes that you need to know what you're doing before playing with it and that doing it wrong can 'brick' your device. And yes, "bricking" was a term that had to be explained to me when I first encountered it). I even have a cam that was "bricked" by a firmware update that didn't work
The real problem here is that people, for whatever reason, don't use language well. Nobody has ever bricked a camera, but plenty have been killed or rendered useless by mistake
Everyone understands "killed" but not everyone understands "bricked". Punctuation and letter-case also make a difference; I have several G1Wx cams but not a single one is a G1W-X
Notice the hyphen and the upper case "X" versus the other. Similar is our 'adoption' of IQ to mean "Image Quality"when in fact all cameras actually have an IQ of zero (Intelligence Quotient; which the entire rest of the world thinks "IQ" means)
And too the clown who bypassed all the other unused letters and chose the "X" as a suffix for their version of a G1W type cam; that was a very poor choice
So that's why I do as I do, using "x" here on DCT, but using "series" or "type" when I'm elsewhere
because I want to be sure that people don't misunderstand me I'm all for changing the world's poor language habits and for bashing the people who think that everybody should understand and adopt their jargon. But I also understand that the practice has become so widespread and accepted that it's not likely to occur even when it clearly causes problems that harm someone.
"I'd love to change the world,
But I don't know what to do.
So I'll leave it up to you."
Phil