I guess the question is, at this point, do you use "lede" because it genuinely can be confused with "lead", because "lead" is just plain overloaded already and you'd like to give the poor word a break, or because it's pretty cool?

In my opinion, they're all valid reasons. And, for me, it probably saves me a couple milliseconds to read "lede" rather than figuring out which meaning of "lead" is intended. But my impression was that genuine confusion was less of a problem now than it was Back In The Day of hot type.

On the gripping hand, I feel that "lede" is a specific enough, and important enough, concept to DESERVE its own word.