Yes, having the option is always preferable! What tends to happen is that, for example, a parent fills out an inquiry at work and uses their work email address, realizes they don't want to have their work email address tied to the account, then fills out another one with their home address, either immediately or later that night when they get home. The accounts are merged, so the contact address changes (so that correspondence will go to their home address), but the BBID doesn't. As a result, when they try to log in with their home address they get the "user does not exist" error. Since they've never tried to log in with the work address, they're confused.

We could avoid all this by defaulting the BBID to the most recent address when accounts are merged. I understand not wanting to change a BBID for a user that has logged in using it, and there are cases where a user wants to keep their BBID different from their contact email address. So the ideal solution would be to have some sort of conditional logic: if the BBID has never been used to log in, and the contact email changes, switch it (or give the option). If it has been used to log in, don't change anything.

It sounds like this request is really about the prospective parent's experience rather than a general BBID swap-out. When a new form is submitted, you have the opportunity to merge existing accounts, and it seems like there's room for improvement in the inquiry/application processing screen. Do we need to give you the option to maintain the new vs. old BBID? Or is the new one always the one you want to keep when 2 accounts are merged? If I'm missing the mark, I'd love to hear additional context to understand the problem better! :)