I have a question I've been trying to understand for awhile now. Google has terrible username policies for accounts and services. You are unable to change your username, recover a deleted account or link usernames to various accounts. It's not possible to do anything. These issues have comes up numerous times with accounts that I manage and take care of.
I understand the security issues such as hackers retrieving deleted email accounts and stuff like that. But I don't quite understand why it's against policies to make general username changes without having to delete your entire accounts and start over from scratch. Most of the responses I've seen is that there's simply too much data that is tied to each username and service. I find that hard to believe when the some of the most popular sites in the world such as Facebook and Twitter offer the ability to swap usernames in an instant.
What do you guys think? Is it BS on Google's part or is there a lot of technical details involved in making changes to things like that?