What is the rationale for requiring a column list when inserting into a table with identity column? When inserting into a table with an identity column from some similar staging table, we have to set IDENTITY_INSERT to ON and specify a column list.

Why do we have to specify a column list in this case?

Wouldn't it be better to specify a change request at Microsoft Connect?
If you don't specify the column list then this implicitly assumes a column list including all user insert-able columns (non identity, rowversion, computed) as below.

CREATE TABLE #T
(
C INT IDENTITY,
D INT,
E INT
)

INSERT INTO #T
VALUES (2,3)


This is far more generally useful as the most common reason for having an IDENTITY column is to allow SQL Server to manage the values.

I suppose it could imply that if there was an extra column in the insert source on an identity table that it should generate an execution plan for the explicit identity_insert case but not much benefit to this IMO.