To me, the term mode should have stuck to using, the white keys on the piano.
I tend to agree on that. I never distinguish between "modes" and "scales" - scales are modes and modes are scales. It's all just scales to me.
Calling one a mode and one a scale is arbitrary - 500 years ago (?) they were very big Ionian fans so they called that the major scale (even though it's not the most "major" - Lydian is) and everything else is "a mode of the major scale".
But if you happen to love Locrian (I do...) or Lydian you could start from there and say Locrian is the major scale and everything is a "mode" of Locrian.
In the diatonic system you've got a collection of 7 notes in a particular order with fixed distances separating them. Start at any point and you can spell a scale that is harmonized in a different way - that's it.
The use of term "mode" as opposed to "scale" and the arbitrary raising of "Major"/Ionian and "Minor"/Aeolian above other modes appears to have caused endless confusion to thousands of musicians and musician wannabes. People really do think that modes are some sort of secret sauce (and the greak names don't help any...)when the whole thing is just simple counting.
Since we agree on the chromatic distances between the notes A,B,C,D,E,F and G, we could just say "The scale starting with A is scale #1" - "The scale starting with F is scale #4" . Nothing to get scared or confused about. (We could also make things easier by using numbers instead of letters to name the notes - but that's a different discussion.)
So that's a new way of teaching music - IDK what
@JeffBerlin , would say about that. I think it would be good. Objectively speaking, what do you lose by working that way? I think mostly we would gain - theory would be easier to grasp and we'd get a lot more varied and creative varieties of music: Musicians wouldn't always be worried about "is this major or is this minor - is this allowed - is this bad?" and they wouldn't be scared to death to mess with mystical "incantations" like "Locrian" or "Lydian".
Problem is that after so many hundreds of years of thinking and writing and notating and designating using the tradition terminology, making a change like that would be impossible. We'd have to rip up everything and start all over.
After the French Revolution, they tried to start using a new calendar, based on the decimal system - ten days to a week etc etc. The new government made that the official calendar - it made much more sense - a lot more symmetrical and logical than the traditional calender that we use. Most people in their private lives ignored it completely. For a couple of years the revolutionary zealots stuck with it. But in few years the whole idea disappeared - it was impossible to change the system that was in place, even though the new one made more sense. It's the same reason they never adopted the metric system for most things in the USA and Great Britain even though it's much easier to work with.
) possible scales. 2 In other words, with the combined genius of medieval monks through Beethoven through Stravinsky and Coltrane, we've managed to explore roughly 1% of this musical terrain. (Admittedly not all of this terrain is equally musically fertile.)"