This has been discussed extensively on github here:
https://github.com/JuliaCollections/AxisArraysFuture/issues/1
And here a few months ago:
https://discourse.julialang.org/t/status-of-axisarrays-jl/
People mostly agree that AxisArrays is inadequate, but for a bunch of different reasons. Mostly we decided to keep working separately (but copying good ideas) and check back in later. There are multiple groups with different goals and reaching a consensus single solution is premature, and really not worth the effort until it’s clearer what the best strategy is. The code isn’t that hard to write, knowing exactly how it should behave that suits all use cases is the issue. Also, competitive cooperation is often a good thing, not some problem we have to fix. I’ve learned a lot from all of the other efforts.
xarrays has stellar documentation because it has been funded. If someone paid me to work on DimensionalData.jl it would too. But its currently just my own side project. And until there is a consensus approach, again it’s not really worth putting the effort in to reach that kind of documentation standard.
Edit: further GeoData.jl already does what you want for NCDatasets.jl. I’m actually kind of confused about why you are avoiding it without at least trying it out. The tests go through everything you need to load netcdf files with dimensional indexing. Your reasoning was exactly mine for writing it in the first place. (Just don’t use gdal with it lol, lots of changes happening over there so its currently broken)