Comment #26 on issue 2505 by [email protected]: Patch: Doc: NR clarified \footnote command as a TextScript
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=2505
"command syntax" and "try to make the code work in all cases" is more or less compatible with what we had before: \footnote was a music command triggering at a particular point of time, but you could use it as an articulation as well together with other articulations, but then you had to specify a Grob type it should attach to. Which is sort of fuzzy.
Making it more tweak-like like I proposed means that there will be only very rare cases where you really need to tell it a grob (like when you want to footnote a flag, or a stem), and even then, you'll find that mostly it will do to just move the stuff by using a different offset.
