@lihaoyi I am very sympathetic to the proposal. I have opened an issue for the varargs change which is the less controversial one, I think. That and the change for omitting initializers would get rid of all obscure uses of _ except for imports.
For changing imports, I don’t know whether we can do it, even though I agree that
import p.{a => _, *}
is clearer than
import p.{a => _, _}