I don't understand your use of the word "prefer" here.
Since Abelian groups are commutative, I prefer the distributive property because it distinguishes multiplication from addition and the commutative property doesn't. Also the distributive property is a concept elementary students can understand, so we don't need to get into endomorphism to explain it. Sorry to be so confusing, I was just trying to make the point that we don't have to read Devlin as arguing that we should teach college concepts to elementary students; we can explain multiplication in ways students can understand without teaching them an incorrect definition that has to be undone later.
