i think the new ones started wtih Greenwald-Khanna. but i definately agree - p^2 can be a little silly and misleading. in particular it is really poor at finding those little modes on the tail that correspond to interesting system behaviours.
That sounds familiar, I remember reading about Greenwald-Khanna before I found T-Digest after I ran into the "how to find a percentile of a massive data set" problem myself.
