So do you use a wheelchair yourself? As you clearly think the commonly preferred term that most people who do use them want, is problematic. What term do you want to use instead?
Ok, I'll answer this as truthfully as I can, and I apologise in advance if any of it sounds like a cop-out, but I can only talk within the terms of reference that I encounter it.
Firstly, no, I am not a wheelchair user myself, which is why when I do encounter this phrase being discussed I will offer input if I'm asked, but I take a back seat because it's not something that is directly relevant to me as an individual. Why I am still required to participate in that discussion though, is that I have partial executive oversight of an organisation that provides a service to a specific demographic within the general public, and many of those individuals are wheelchair users, so it is important for us to have some agreed, preferred terminology that we use in our organisations publications, both external and internal.
I note that you use a generic 'we' when referring to a preference for the term 'wheelchair user'. What is interesting about this to me is that as an organisation we have used that term before now as that is commonly agreed to be the preferred language throughout our discipline, however, what actually prompted the discussion was our own service users questioning the term themselves. We have more than one 'regular' who believes it is possibly outdated, and since we continually review all of our publications, we felt that it was necessary to include that specific term in the group that we discussed.
As of yet, nothing has actually changed, but it probably will be included in the terms we put to consultation of our service users. What will happen in practice is that if a majority of our service users express a preference for that term above any other suggestion, then that's the term we will continue to use.
My personal thoughts on it won't come into consideration, and as for my suggestions about alternatives, I don't really have any viable ones that aren't a total mouthful, but again my personal dislike of the term is purely because the dominant word in the phrase is 'wheelchair' and the only reference to an actual human is in 'user'. We've gone through similar consultations with other terms, some of which are still in use despite being objected to by some people. "Service User" is one that isn't universally popular, and I completely understand the arguments against it, but when we consult the actual people that term refers to, they invariably come back with a majority favouring 'Service User' over any of the other proposals. When the time comes, if the same happens with 'wheelchair user' then it will stay, and as I said, my personal thoughts about it are irrelevant and I'll continue to use it myself in the appropriate setting.