Many decisions are made on the IRC channels. Most of what’s said on IRC is recorded and logged, the logs can be viewed (and searched) here. The only discussion I could find relevant to the “keyboards” instrument can be viewed here.
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Hi! I finally have access to community again! I apologise for my absence but it was outside of my control.
Now for the issues debated here I want to be a bit long stretching and generic, you will forgive me doing this only the one time but it’s about time I address some concerns I see in this and other threads about instruments, and quite a bit of reasons why I tend to eschew interacting with these threads in general;
When I ask for tickets I do so not just to reject them, I want it stored there so that I have that ticket, see the “keyboards” ticket? I ask for a better ticket there, that ticket never came.
What helps is thorough and comprehensive done tickets - even something that has been rejected before can, if explained better, be accepted, remember that https://musicbrainz.org/doc/How_to_Add_Instruments is a guide, not a hard rule
But also remember that it was written for a reason: these decisions aren’t all done for “academical, stubborn, not-in-touch-with-reality” reasons, they are made so that every one can use the right instruments - remember that your use-case isn’t everyones, remember that for things like composition and lyrics, we use these instead of “writer” when we know better, we correct typoes when we know they are not intentional etc.
That was the reason behind “membranophone” and “guitar family”, NOT to make life harder for everyone, but to fix a really big problem.
I do think about the issues with “I only have x on the liner notes I don’t know what instrument it is further than that!” it’s a problem that plagues me when creating instruments descriptions “how to make especially sure that no-one will misunderstand what this is or use it wrongly?”
It’s a problem that plagues me when I myself use instrument relationships.
This is also why the guideline was put in place, also why the “membranophone” changes were put in an non-auto-edit etc. to try to let everyone in and discuss it, let the community contribute. Only after the fact did people pipe up.
And I have to be honest here. Some of the things said where absolutely not nice, are still not nice.
I get that it’s from frustration, and I sincerely apologise for creating that frustration, but remember: I’m doing this outa my own free time, noone’s paying me, and I’m NOT FINISHED YET (if I ever will be), The “keyboard(s)” is just such one issue - I’m not against making the keyboard instrument we have be more generic, I might not even be against renaming it, but more research needs to be done and I’m only one person.
Further; improvements to MB’s datastructure/relationship-structure may (hopefully) mean that some things will be alleviated still, for example the inclusion of several “not instruments” like microphones, effect-machines et al. the ability to only select logical instruments (ie having “contra-bass” and “electric bass guitar” shown next to bass), tools to mass-change instrument credits (to fix the “membranophone issue”)
If anyone here is a coder, patches are welcome! And if not, well you’re stuck in the same rut as me, because I am not a coder! I do a LOT of research to try to find out The Truth™ about an instrument - sometimes this is more akin to a detective novel than anything else :D and truth, perhaps I’ll “nerd out” about some instrument - make it more academical, but isn’t that what MusicBrainz is all about? We all nerd out about music! (and if you think instruments are bad, you should see labels! :P)
And the coders? Our devs are hard at work doing other, much more pressing things - fixing bugs, converting to react, developing ListenBrainz to bring in hard-needed new customers, and so on.
All I ask of you all is that to remember in your frustration that we are all working here - noone here is trying to make your life harder, especially with adding data, all I ask of you is a little patience. Thank you so much.
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Nicely written. As to “keyboard(s)”, that’s a tough call too. There are many sides to chew on. From a casual user point of view, generic would be the way to go. From the super editor with OCD standpoint, specificity is a must. Lotsa luck. 
Irregardless, glad you’re back.
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I assumed people started setting the credit because they don’t trust that the instrument name isn’t going to change (see membranophone).
(Setting the credit for artist relationships is pretty much always recommended too, is it not?)
So if you are entering a release yourself, and the liner notes say: drums
What do you enter, and are you satisfied with the available options yourself?
And when the liner notes say: keyboards
What do you enter, and are you satisfied with the available options yourself?
You cannot have an instrument name that matches all releases, we can use instrument credits.
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I am still curious…