Once again, disagree. The appointment, or rather annointment of Harris would be viewed as “politics as usual”; talk about “smoke filled rooms!”

Of course it would be. Any convention nominee would be. Conventions are where political deals are brokered by party insiders in hotel rooms and conference calls and restaurant bars. Candidate surrogates cutting deals with delegates as they shuttle from hotel to hotel, the lobbies and bathrooms and side chambers and any other private place in the convention hall. They're not populist referenda where candidates are weighed on their merits out in the open sunshine.

The problem with an open convention isn't that the optics of it will be worse (although that's certainly on the cards). It's that there's a very high probability that a significant faction of the party will come out of it feeling like they were treated unjustly - that the other side "cheated" in some way. That bitter feeling sometimes happens even in primaries, when the selection criterion (the person who gets the most votes wins!) and the selection process (we had an election to see who got the most votes!) are about as agreed-upon and fair as they can be. In a convention, where there is no selection criteria and the selection process is far more opaque and less regulated, the odds are really good that you end up with a significant faction coming out thinking the game was unfairly rigged against them.

IMHO, that's almost certain to happen with a wide-open convention. Might it happen with a Harris coronation? Maybe, but I think there's at least a chance it can be avoided - especially since I don't think that Biden anoints Harris unless the other likely contenders agree to back her. She's the only one that anyone could approach the top alternatives with that pitch. Whitmer's not stepping aside for Newsom (or vice versa), since none of them have any plausible claim being ahead of all the equals - but they might for Harris, since she's the Veep.