I just think it's patently absurd for scientists to categorize objects on the basis of the numbers of objects that they can remember.

I don't believe we should classify planetary objects by location. We should use properties of the objects as a guide.

Pluto is just the brightest of the many objects in the Kuiper Belt. It's a fossil relic of the formation of our solar system.

Just speaking for myself, I think the return of people to the Moon has a lot to offer for understanding the formation and evolution of terrestrial worlds; so would the exploration of near-Earth asteroids by people.

In science, we take large numbers of disparate facts and reduce them to see patterns. We use the patterns to reduce the amount of information. It's the reason we name species and genera and families in biology. It's also the reason we have names for certain types of geological features and so on in other fields.

A miniature poodle is not not a dog just because it's miniature.