Looking "back" now, it never occurred to me that importing List when there is list is particularly strange. Now it sticks out sorely. Very glad this change is happening.
That's because we're conditioned to think of constructors as functions rather than as types. I think that's not that odd honestly but I do see how counterintuitive it is for people that don't work much in typed languages. I'm not a Haskellite but there you can clearly see the distinction when defining/instantiating sum types (where the type and data constructor live in different namespaces).