I'm not really interested, but I think you are taking the whole Arcane damage problem backward..
Gameplay will trump universe concern as much as is reasonably possible because it is always easier to tweak the univers than to tweak the gameplay. Holy was boring. Balanced but boring. after 1.2 was out (and well balanced) we believed it was the right time to upset the balance in order to have the game more interesting, since we had lot of time before 1.4 to rebalance everything afterward. Holy was an obvious target. The problem with Holy was carefully analyzed, and the main problem was that it was too specialized 1) because it is very powerfull it could only be scarcely given, and so was rarely used. 2) when you had it, either you were fighting undead and it was too powerfull, or you weren't and it was useless. (the unit itsef would still be usefull, but the holy damage was useless) note that increasing holy damage to make it more usefull against non-undead was not really possible because undead fight would be heavily unbalanced. so it was decided to make holy more usefull, and the only way to have that was to make it both more available and less specialized. we also wanted to keep it linked to magic, because there arn't that many "magic" damage types (only holy and ice, fire being a mixed magic/mundane damage) lots of brainstorming took place, and we eventually agreed to have a damage type that would be a sort of "anti-magic" affecting more units that would be sensible to magic (undead, of course, but alsoelves, orcs etc...) at that point, it was obvious that the damage type wasn't "holy" anymore, and would be rename. Ok, this is the point where we started to take the univers into account. Fortunately, "anti magic" kind of stuff actually fit quite well in medieval fantastic themes, whatever the theme you choose. If you want to stay to pure medieval theme, with elves being almost fairies "disbelief" or "faith" would fit. Medieval elves were afraid of that. However, I won't restart the whole naming debate, let's just say that Arcane was choosen eventually. So, if you want Holy back, please don't drag the universe into the debate. It's not that the universe is not important, it's that the wesnoth universe isn't set in stone, and it's easier to change the universe to fit what we want on the balance front than the other way round. so, please restate you posotion wrt Holy vs Arcane, focussing mainly on game interest and balance, but keep in mind that Arcane is new, and thus hasn't been balanced as well as Holy, but that's just something that needs some time to be balanced.
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