I'm not sure how you envision that would work. Should the contents of a package mutate when another version of the same package is installed? Would you consider that to be a sane behavior?

No, you use your package manager's alternatives system to manage who gets the "default" name.

Yes, that's covered by the last paragraph of my initial comment - it's generally handled by symlinks already.

jspaetzel seems to think this isn't good enough though, and that the commands should magically just have the non versioned name until multiple versions show up on the same system. I'm curious about how they envision that to work.