Maybe the issue is that I work with SQL constantly.  In SQL, if I say "SELECT a, b, c FROM t" and table t has columns a, b, c, d, e, f, I can still select a, b, and c from the result.  So to me it is natural that getting a bunch of attributes returns something (row or object, depending on the context), where the attributes are still labelled.

I understand why this was rejected as a universal change to attrgetter - in particular, I didn't re-evaluate the appropriateness of the change once I realized that attrgetter has a C implementation - but I don't understand why this isn't considered a natural option to provide.

Using rename=True is just a way of having it not blow up if an attribute name requiring renaming is supplied.  I agree that actually using such an attribute requires either guessing the name generated by the rename logic in namedtuple or using numeric indexing.  If namedtuple didn't have rename=True then I wouldn't try to re-implement it but since it does I figure it's worth typing ", rename=True" once - it's hardly going to hurt anything.

Finally as to use cases, I agree that if the only thing one is doing is sorting it doesn't matter.  But with groupby it can be very useful.  Say I have an iterator providing objects with fields (heading_id, heading_text, item_id, item_text).  I want to display each heading, followed by its items.

So, I groupby attrgetter ('heading_id', 'heading_text'), and write a loop something like this:

for heading, items in groupby (source, attrgetter ('heading_id', 'heading_text')):
    # display heading
    # refer to heading.heading_id and heading.heading_text
    for item in items:
        # display item
        # refer to item.item_id and item.item_text

Except I can't, because heading doesn't have attribute names.  If I replace attrgetter with namedattrgetter then I'm fine.  How would you write this?  In the past I've used items[0] but that is (a) ugly and (b) requires "items = list(items)" which is just noise.

I feel like depending on what is being done with map and filter you could have a similar situation where you want to refer to the specific fields of the tuple coming back from the function returned by attrgetter.