I understand the functionality of the People tag will develop. I’m starting to use People tags more often now, and it would be useful to know if the format I’m using might be forward compatible with what’s to come.
I’m using @JosephBloggs. It would be annoying to find out that in future the standard format required to link People tags with Apple Contacts was, for example, @Joseph_Bloggs, meaning I’d need to edit every person tag!
Related request, I think. I would like to be able to globally replace every instance of @JosephBloggs with @Bloggs_Joseph. Similar for #tags.
I understand your concern, however it’s very likely that none of the possible schemes you use right now would be compatible with a future integration with the contacts app, simply because we cannot make assumptions on whether someone would want any tags to be converted to something else automatically without explicit approval. Having said that, and as @konetidy already suggest, we do want to bring a tag/people manager/editor alongside such improvements, which would then allow you to replace them yourself.
We haven’t started on this yet, but it is quite likely we would introduce some matching system. Eg. you could say @Joseph_Bloggs corresponds to Max Taylor in my contacts. or @JB is Joseph Bloggs in my contacts. So I don’t think the tag you choose now matters.