The Latin versions of Cyrillic-script names of Russian composers (in their alias and sort name for the English locale) is usually given in MB as the full name including the middle patronym. This is used by Picard if the relevant option is set. However, LastFM complains and says that “This is mistagged for {the short name without the patronym}” and goes on to say that "Can’t this and {short name} be combined? It’s silly how his correctly spelled Cyrillic name includes his middle name, but his correctly spelled English name doesn’t"
Which is right? The poor user seems to be piggy-in-the-middle between two differing views of style. Has their been any dialogue between MB and LastFM on this?
No, and there’s no particular reason for it to be, honestly. Any decision should be taken in MB itself, even if we take how last.fm does this into account (which given they’re not very good about tagging, we might not want to).
Actually, a bunch of composers (particularly Tchaikovsky) are very often written with the patronymic in English as well (for… reasons? I still don’t understand why to be honest).
In any case, I wouldn’t mind setting the primary English/Latin alias as the one without the patronymic for most cases, with the exception of the ones where the patronymic is common usage in English. That’d seem to be the most appropriate given what a primary alias is supposed to be 
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Similar considerations apply for Russian performers as well as composers. I am a bit wary about changing the alias since it affects many releases, but it does seem sensible to follow accepted convention.
Changing the English alias doesn’t really affect anything in MB other than the alias itself (of course changing the main name or artist credits would be different).
The main thing it changes is the Picard tag when “translate artist names to this locale…” is selected. I’ll make the changes as I come across instances and try and follow the most commonly accepted name.
Correction - Picard seems to pick the sort name in preference to the alias, so the sort name would have to be changed as well - any comments?
If there is a bug it is prolly in https://github.com/metabrainz/picard/blob/release-1.4.2/picard/mbxml.py#L122-L162
Can you link to concerned releases so we can reproduce and debug the issue (if any) ?
If you use release 3138efb6-cef9-44af-92e6-459b8f98c0c4 this has Sergei Prokofiev as the composer. I have changed the alias to exclude the patronym and can see that the artist record is ok. What appears to be happening is that the Artist tag is being correctly picked up by Picard from the alias, but that the Composer tag still has the patronym and so is presumably being picked up from the sort name.