Dear Michael,
it has been a while, but it may interest you that we have relaxed the naming convention for database, user and event names [1]. Dots are still reserved for hidden directories, though.
We are working on the namespace issue that you mentioned recently.
Best regards, Christian
[1] http://docs.basex.org/wiki/Commands#Valid_Names ___________________________
Speaking for myself, I guess that as a user I haven't thought much about what characters should be allowed in collection names, but I may have assumed that if they are not unrestricted, they would be restricted to being legal NCNames. I do kind of like using dots in names, so you can count this as one vote for relaxing the naming rules at some convenient moment. It's not a really important point, of course.