This category seems to make up a large but distinct portion of the questions here. So far I have seen:
Example question: How do I program BTC Relay into my dapp?
Personally, I'm in favor of standardizing contract-design as the de-facto tag for the whole category.
I suggest:
smart-contracts for general questions on smart contracts.
contract-design, contract-debugging and contract-development for special issues while creating smart contracts.
dapp for anything broader on the concept of decentralized apps.
remove debugging and development in favour of the more specialized tags mentioned above.
I generally agree with your suggestion, buy we may continue to get a variety of those tags. Thanks for using my example - lol.
The use of contract-design and contract-development seems to be more appropriate for the development of a smart contract. And I make a suggestion: We can use contract-development also to refer the debug, so in that way we delete the debugging tag currently working in the site.
I think this is a distinct category of things that we will probably keep running into. In my industry we call the peocess of making third-party widgets talk to each "Integration" so when there is a clear purpose in someone's question where they take a component like BTCRelay, or Maker's DAI stablecoin, I would think a tag like "Contract-Integration" would fit quite nicely.
Integration I feel is distinct from debugging, because there may be nothing wrong yet tbat needs fixing. You just might need some documentation explained more clealry for you to proceed. I also expect the most common pieces of infrastructure (Coin API, NameReg, etc.) to end up with canonical answers for how to integrate them with you custom contract.
So, specifically for a question like the example linked, I would suggest the tag "Contract-Integration".
