Fwiw, I'm probably -0 on the feature itself. Someone suggested it could be useful for xarray, but I'm not sure now what that would look like. If someone had an example, I could easily be moved.
Here is what it currently looks like to assign values to indices in xarray (adapted from a tutorial):
ds["empty"].loc[dict(lon=5, lat=6)] = 10
This could be changed to:
ds["empty"][lon=5, lat=6] = 10
This becomes even a bigger advantage if we include slicing, which I think we should:
ds["empty"].loc[dict(lon=slice(1, 5), lat=slice(3, None))] = 10
to
ds["empty"][lon=1:5, lat=6:] = 10