Thank you for the well-reasoned response. I try not to get too tied down by semantics or pedantry, but I think there is a value in avoiding sloppy language when it can result in muddled thinking. The points you make in your last paragraph are more or less exactly what inspired me to make this post.

Really, I don't care what Corneliu originally meant by nootropic or what it has meant over the years--I care that within a community, it is used with at least enough consistency to have some sort of communicative value. That's why I suggested the broader, three-element definition that I feel roughly follows the characteristics that people here frequently use to identify identify something as "nootropic" or "not nootropic".

The more pedantic element of my post relates to whether we should restrict our use of the word based on the purpose for which a medicine is used. There is some value in this: for example, tianeptine is a promising treatment for IBS, but it would be odd to post in /r/ibsregimens looking for "An IBS treatment for depression". It wouldn't be wholly inaccurate--tianeptine is in fact an IBS treatment that helps depression. But the question implies more than that. A better post would ask for "an IBS treatment that also helped depression". The fact that tianeptine helps depression is immaterial to the fact that it is an IBS treatment, just as it is immaterial to the fact that it is a cognitive enhancer.

However, this is irrelevant if we consider treating depression to be a kind of cognitive enhancement, as you suggest above. No doubt, it does improve the cognitive performance of the depressed. So then the question becomes, to what degree is it valuable to segregate treatments for pathologies from attempts to raise the baseline, while recognizing that there will be substantial overlap in regimens? In other words, should we be conscientious of whether we are describing something as an "upgrade" or a "repair"?

You've mostly convinced me that I'm overreacting.

We need to make sure that people new to the field understand that "nootropic" or "cognitive enhancer" is not synonymous with "neurotrophic", that treating an underlying pathology is a better way to improve cognition than seeking general enhancement, and that the appropriate substance to treat a cognitive pathology may not be either a nootropic or an enhancer (recognizing that anything that causes an improvement permitting improved use of cognitive resources could be considered an "enhancer").

If we are careful about that, it's needlessly picky to distinguish between "what nootropics help depression" and "what antidepressants also have nootropic qualities".