"There is no such fact established in this thread, there is a "want" and so what, is there a "need"?"

Well, I'm not familiar with Jan's BASIC interpreter, but the norm with a computer running BASIC is that you type in lines of code then type 'RUN' to make it go. You don't reset the computer - that would take you back to the prompt. Anyway, there are lots of occasions when we code things the way we want rather than the way we need. Say I need to output some data through the serial port. I want to send it as ASCII to make debugging easy - I don't need to, but I want to.

"Just about anything related to IAP is "risky", the risk related to a power outage or noise spike at a critical moment."

The discussion was with regard to storing data in RAM across resets. The power off flag allows one to determine whether a reset or a power cycle occurred, if a 'noise spike' screws something up you're stuffed whatever you were doing.

"If so, why 'P' for programming, not "MW" or such?"

Programming flash, EPROM, EEPROM etc just refers to setting the bits within bytes to predetermined values. It doesn't describe the meaning of those bits. For example, 'EPROM programmer'.