Hi John, it should not be reserved, although it is used by Akelos internally to decide which models it should automatically load when instantiating the controller.

Next month I start coding a modeling site so this will become a problem for me as well. I fixed it on my local copy, but still need to test it before committing it into the trunk.

Here is the un-unit-tested patch

Index: lib/AkActionController.php
===================================================================
--- lib/AkActionController.php  (revision 1060)
+++ lib/AkActionController.php  (working copy)
@@ -393,6 +393,8 @@

         $models = array_unique(array_merge(Ak::import($this->model), Ak::import($this->models), Ak::import($models), (empty($this->app_models)?array(): Ak::import($this->app_models))));

+        unset($this->model, $this->models);
+                
         foreach ($models as $model){
             $this->instantiateModelClass($model, (empty($this->finder_options[$model])?array():$this->finder_options[$model]));
         }