Ultimately I believe the disconnect comes down to the following requirements:

1. A region-name can be used multiple times, even for different types. Personally I feel like its bad to allow mixing transactional data (entity, natural-id and collection) with non-transactional (query, update-timestamps) in the same region; but that may be a largely arbitrary distinction.
2. A Region can host multiple "access strategies"

In other words these are all valid caching set ups:

@Entity
@Immutable
@Cacheable
@Cache( region="a.b.c", usage=READ_ONLY )
@NaturalIdCache( region="a.b.c", usage=READ_ONLY )
class SomeEntity {
    ...
}

@Entity
@Cacheable
@Cache( region="a.b.c", usage=TRANSACTIONAL )
class AnotherEntity {
    ...
    @Cache( region="a.b.c", usage=TRANSACTIONAL )
    Collection someCollection;
}

So we have a single region here named "a.b.c" holding entity, natural-id and collection data with varying concurrent access handling. Do you both agree that, with or without Chris Dennis's change, those requirements can be achieved?