Briefly looking at the Avro APIs (I am not fluent with Avro), this seems to be a change to a less specific interface -- allow indexing by index, and do not require (but still allow, the user would have to cast) indexing by name. Correct?
Is that likely to mess up existing users? Should we provide some convenience method that does the casting for them so they don't have to deal with it? I don't feel strongly one way or another, just want to hear your and other Avro people's thoughts.