JW's are still left with the problem of why God would let his name be removed, and why he didn't at least ensure any actual MSS evidence exists to absolutely prove it was removed. And why is Jesus never once recorded in the gospels as addressing Jehovah by anything other than 'Father' or 'God', never by the divine name or anything similar. This is a knockdown argument against the JW's position as I see it.
Further, while you are right that without the divine name or variants that would enable a clear distinction between the Father and the Son many passages in the NT just don't make sense or are ambiguous, George Howard notes that replacing the name with Kurios likely contributed to the development of the Trinity, since the identity of Jehovah and Jesus became indistinguishable in many passages. Why would God, if he is so completely concerned about "having a people for his (literal) name" and exclusively receiving all religious devotion, let this happen? Why would he let the Bible get corrupted like this in such a way that it may have played a major part in the development of the allegedly blasphemous Trinity? And why would he inspire the Apostle Paul to clearly directly apply to Jesus some OT scriptures that spoke about Jehovah? This suggests Paul himself has planted the seeds for the ontological confusion about the identity of God!
I don't believe Stafford and the Watchtower et al have addressed those objections, have they? If they have, I would really like to see their refutations of those points.
Although I do not agree with Lundquists trinitarian conclusions about all this, it seems to me the only sensible explanation, call it a compromise if you like, is what Ray Franz suggests in In Search of Christian Freedom, ie, that Jehovah deliberately inspired the NT writers to use Lord instead of the tetragram (or he allowed it to disappear from all trace in the NT) because Jehovah himself viewed the tetragram as his old covenant name, applicable to the Jewish people only, and that upon the creation of the new covenant and opening of salvation to the gentiles, God deliberately wanted to be known by the title Father (as Jesus predominantly called Jehovah) rather than by the tetragram and he purposefully wanted the emphasis to shift to his Son. It seems that Jesus effectively fulfilled the tetragrammaton, since Jesus became the Yes and Amen to all prophecy. Or in other words, Jehovah gave his name to Jesus.
What this suggests to me is that the NWT translation committee had correct motives in inserting (we cannot say 'restoring' with full confidence) the divine name in the NT as a way of better distinguishing between the Father and the Son, thus helping purify the muddied waters which have contributed to trinitarian confusion about the ontological identity of Jehovah and Jesus (or even worse, modalism); but the Watchtower went too far by insisting that the divine name is an identification of the true religion, and by inserting the name in some placeswhere the context clearly suggests the Lord is in fact Jesus. Conversely, trinitarians in the early history of the church went too far by conflating the Lord Jesus with the Lord God in identity. Ray Franz's explanation is a stroke of genius I feel.
