Thank you everyone for adding to this conversation.
Dear Coda, please understand that there is almost zero benefit to this behaviour, and that minimal benefit is far outweighed by the challenges it causes.
So, PLEASE just get rid of it, rather than trying to “limit the logic” of when it is employed. All that approach is doing is further reducing any perceived benefit anyway, and actually just strengthens the reasons to just get rid of it altogether.
I have two scenarios that affect me. In both cases I use an intermediary table to do data checking etc. Because these helper tables only ever have a single record in them (because the helper record gets deleted once the process is over).
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The first example is when creating a support request. In there I have a text field for record numerical ID numbers from another system. So why a text field? Because I often need to record more than one so I do that as a comma separated string. When this happens a bunch of downstream functionality gets broken, and one of the reasons for that is because when the column gets changed to numbers the thousand’s separator is turned on by default, so a comma gets added to the now number, breaking future functions that split the field on the comma. Sure, I could change all my logic to workaround this, but I shouldn’t have to.
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I have another example where a relation column gets changed to text. This is also in an intermediary table. I have a table for sending a quick email to a customer. The recipient field in this table is a relation column to the customers table. When I click my “send email” button in the customer table it creates a record in the email table and sets the recipient column to the customer, but very annoyingly, the recipient column sometimes gets changed to a text field which breaks my send email button (because it references “recipient.email_address”. Yes, I could change all my logic to workaround this, but I shouldn’t have to.
So, there are many reasons as provided by the contributors to this post why this is just bad all round.
So please just get rid of it, or failing that provide a workspace-wide setting (preferably) to turn it off (or at the very least a per-doc setting to do it).