If anybody working for YouTube is reading this, here are my comments:

I was actually supportive of G+ until I had a very bad experience with YouTube and the forced G+ integration recently. Now what I want from YouTube is

(1) Ability to keep my current username and not use my real name, and not be linked to my G+ profile. I do not want to inadvertently broadcast my YouTube "Likes" to my social network.

(2) I do not want a public channel (not even something like youtube.com/user/<username>) but I want to create private playlists for myself (which is currently not possible without a public channel). The reason I do not want a public channel is because I have no doubt at some point YouTube will manage to "reset" my privacy preferences and expose all my likes, comments etc. to the world through my publicly accessible channel page. And since my YouTube username is just my FirstnameLastname, anybody who googles my name will find all my YouTube activity history.

So till recently whenever YouTube would pop up its dialog boxes insisting I link my channel or use my real name etc., I would always try to choose the option that was closest to what I wanted (as described above). However these dialog box options gave little to no hint as to what are the hidden consequences of choosing one option or the other, and long story short, I managed to somehow end up, first with a public facing channel (yt.com/user/<username>), and then when I tried to get rid of it/make it private because of above mentioned privacy concerns, I ended up losing access to all my playlists INCLUDING my Favorites and Watch Later default playlists.

Now of course that was probably a result of what I unknowingly did, but at no point did YouTube warn me that I would lose my playlists and favorites (YouTube never gave me the slightest hint that private channels cannot have playlists, I had to google it out later from the product forums). I have been a user of a lot of badly designed websites, but no website so far has ever allowed me to delete all of my data without a warning of some sort. Anyway, I got very scared at what YouTube and G+ had done to my account, so I quickly unlinked G+ from YouTube and deleted my G+ profile (I didn't want to end up losing my data in Gmail too).

Thankfully, after I contacted YouTube customer support, they got back to me pretty soon and restored my old YouTube account, somehow I had managed to delete it and create a new one in its place with my real name (hmm I wonder how), and I got back access to my playlists. However the incident has shaken my confidence a lot in Google and its services. I have now started backing up all my data in Gmail to my laptop using Thunderbird. Since YouTube support restored my account to what it originally was, I still keep getting those YouTube dialog boxes asking me to use my real name etc., on average once every other video I try to watch. Now I just refresh the page or watch in incognito mode if it won't go away, hopefully someday YouTube will realize I am not interested and stop annoying me.

To be honest I am nowadays actually really scared to mess around with the account settings of Gmail or other Google services. I remember that whole Google Plus real name policy and en-masse accounts deletion fiasco. I actually have two Google accounts, both made a long time back, both with my real name and I am sure this violates some TOS of Google, and I am genuinely worried that one day Google will suddenly just suspend/delete my accounts without warning because of this.