> Wouldn't it be more explicit if there was a designated keyword that objects could use to access their own members

Not really. You end up implicitly injecting some value into local namespaces instead of having a function that takes an argument.

The implicitness of methods working differently than normal functions > the implicitness of classes passing a first argument to methods.

Should super then also be a method argument?

Honestly, I think it would have made some amount of sense to make super a method defined on the base object so that

    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self.super(x, y)

would be the convention. There may be some infra issue with this (and in general, `super` has to be kind of magical no matter how you handle it). But yes, in general I can vibe with "super is too implicit".

Ruby generally (I think? I haven't seen much of Ruby code) uses "@" instead of "self.", and "@@" instead of "ParticularClassName." (btw, "self.__class__" doesn't cut it), and it seems to produce no namespace pollution.