How does that make any sense at all? I don't see it making any more sense at all, not even a little bit. There's nothing arbitrary about C major/A minor being taught first as it's just the simplest scale with no sharps and flats. And calling a clearly minor scale major under a new system doesn't clear anything up for anyone.
The original question is frequently misinterpreted, so I can understand the confusion. I've seen the same question asked on forums a few times and someone always comes out of the woodwork saying that, "Well, ABCDEFG is a minor scale, not a major scale, what are you even going on about?" Let's ignore the part about why the scales we call C major / A minor being taught first, because we all agree that it makes sense to teach those scales first.
The question is, "Why are the notes labeled the way they are, instead of some different labeling (which would change their relationships between each other)?" This has nothing at all to do with "calling a clearly minor scale major". Let's suppose we relabel the notes, so that C is now named "A", D is now named "B", E is now named "C", et cetera. In this alternate universe, Ab is enharmonically equivalent to G, and the scale "ABCDEFGA" is a major scale, and "FGABCDEF" is the corresponding minor scale.
Part of the question is, "Why did we name the notes the way we do, instead of that other way?" That's actually an interesting question, once you get down to it.
Another part of the question is, "Isn't our system kind of arbitrary, and doesn't this alternative universe make more sense?" The answer is "No, the alternative universe isn't inherently better or less arbitrary, for the various reasons we talked about in this thread."
The main two reasons why we wouldn't prefer one universe over the other are because (1) both the Ionian and the Aeolian modes are important in western music, and it's difficult to claim that one is more important than the other, and (2) you have to learn a bunch of other scales anyway, and if you have a hard time with CDEFGABC then you're never going to make it through other basic scales like G major or F major.
(Bug... the "flat" symbol seems to be getting stripped out of my post... so forgive me for using "b" instead U+266D)
Ah, OK that's much clearer, I understand now. I'd say this, picking A for what is now C would be just as arbitrary as there is no "first" scale, they're all equally important and trying to match up a first scale to the first letter of the alphabet would be just as arbitrary. For those who feel the need to start with A, then start with minor scales, A minor first, artificial newbie weirdness solved.
