* The new behavior maintains consistency between < and >, so that specifiers that “look” the same act the same, maintaining consistency between them.
* I think that having the > and < behavior vary is a *worse* confusion, and I believe that the behavior of < is far better than previous.

I'm not following the old inconsistencies you're referring to. Maybe you can explain those, or reference this in the PEP.
But in any case, the argument isn't over whether PEP440 is better than the old implementation, in total.