Yes, exactly. One strike doesn't mean it's out, and with a proposal
like this, it's a matter of looking at a whole lot of imperfect
alternatives and seeing which tradeoffs we want to go with. (And
status quo is one such alternative, with tradeoffs of "names need to
be duplicated".)
I think you've missed on alternative. Well, it's a variation on "status quo": Use a silly magic helper function like my Q() or Alex' dict_of() in his sorcery library. (Albeit, I tried his library, and it seemed to have a bug I filed an issue on, which might be fixed yesterday; I haven't tried again).
But if anyone really wants abbreviated calls with parameters now, they can use:
process_record(**Q(email, firstname, lastname, cellphone))
That gets skipping `email=email, ...` if you really want. And it's within a character or two of the length of other proposals.
Understand that I'm not really advocating for a magic function like Q(). I think it's important to keep in mind that anyone COULD create such a thing for 20 years, and very few people bothered to. If repeating names was actually such a big pain point, a decent solution has been available for a very long time, but it didn't itch enough for many people to write a few lines with some slight magic to scratch it.
In a number of similar discussion, someone has proposed new syntax to do something. And I have often written a little utility function to do generally the same thing, perhaps with somewhat cryptic internals. My 15 minute attempts at magic usually have some bugs or limitations, but that's not really the point. Many of the new syntax ideas COULD be done with an arcane function that only needs to be written once (but better than my 15 minute versions). The fact that such magic functions are not in widespread use, to my mind, argues quite strongly against them actually meriting new syntax.
Just feeling like some syntax would be clever or cute should not be enough motivation to add it, which a lot of proposals feel like to me. We need a real world advantage. For that, the commonness of existing workarounds to do near-equivalent things is very germane.