There is a fundamental incompatibility between the approaches much of the GIS world takes to coordinates to that used in climate and earth system modelling (the CF conventions).
There is a fascinating discussion over on the Pangeo Forum about this, and attempts to bridge the gap in xarray.
Interesting, I like this quote from Kirill “the fundamental issue of figuring out pixel correspondence between two different rasters with very similar but not quite exactly the same coordinate system will remain though.”
I think the suggestion change gets around some of the issues though. Like it should not be possible to end up with data from the same raster with coordinates that don’t align?
I am not sure I totally buy into the change though … arrays of coordinates seem much more intuitive than relying on a coordinate system.