Speaking from personal experience, and having been confused by this duplication in the past, the problems as I see them are: a. More than one way of doing things. This means that there is duplication between the hook_something() and hook_nodeapi('something'). b. This duplication causes confusion to many developers (myself included). I will leave others to comment on the details codewise, but here are the options, in order of (my) preference: 1. Restricting node hooks to one way of doing things (hook_nodeapi). This means deprecating all hook_something() for node operations. This way there is no confusion. 2. Eliminating all the hook_something() that are duplicated by hook_nodeapi('something') and do not suffer the drawbacks listed above. This may mean leaving the node_load() hook, and maybe others, and that is fine by me. Less confusion. 2a. Same as 2, but eliminate the nodeapi('something') that has an indispensible hook_something() equivalent. This way we are back to one way of doing things. 3. If the present scheme MUST stay as it is, then I don't know if documentation improvement will be enough to overcome the drawbacks. Other ideas?