My Continued Intellectual Wrestling Match with RDA

When I first read through the drafts of RDA, I didn't think it felt very different from AACRII, and I seem to remember telling someone that at the time. It set them at ease, which was nice I suppose. It made me very uneasy. Because there are only two paths from there: either I am an idiot incapable of understanding how fundamentally this is changing everything (terrifying), or there's not that much change yet an extra 500 pages of material (unlikely?). I really hoped that it was the former.

Then someone posted in the comments a few days ago that they didn't think that RDA changed much in the way that we catalog, day-to-day (they were apparently part of a testing site). I don't like that, because if it doesn't, does that mean we didn't need RDA in the first place, but rather a reinterpretation of the rules of AACRII? Or does it mean that once we get something more flexible and attuned to RDA than MARC, the whole game will change again and we'll need to reinterpret RDA again? Either way that comment made me uncomfortable because it just reinforced what I already felt.

I really want RDA to be different. I want it to do all the things that the visionaries want it to do. But I also have this feeling that we're all so entrenched in the traditions of cataloging that we're almost incapable of making fundamental changes to our rules. Maybe we should start an Ender's Game-esque school for kids, where they do whatever they want, without foreknowledge of the rules, and teach us all a lot about military strategy cataloging.