Do you believe PDD should be a separate diagnosis?

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The problem with taking the DSM's word for it is it goes only on the ability to approach people socially and/or respond to social approaches in a way that the average nonautistic person could understand. However, many people who cannot make such approaches or responses actually would want to be social at least some of the time if you asked them. When I talk especially to people who have the most extreme appearance (to most people) of not wanting to be social, one of the biggest problems they describe is loneliness, OR they talk about how various things they were doing all along were social approaches nobody recognized, OR they had been socializing all along in ways people unlike them could not recognize. Sometimes it's also a vicious cycle where even if they make obvious social approaches, others say they can't possibly be social approaches because the person is autistic (and the DSM has its own role in perpetuating that idea). And my own experiences bear out most of those descriptions at different times in my life. Additionally where I happen personally to be on the reserved side I'm still somewhat more social than people expect from my appearance because I'm unable to make approaches usually. (I'm also usually unable to turn others away.)

This is such a common experience among many autistic people that some have an opposite and equally wrong stereotype that it's only AS people who are extremely introverted, whereas autistic people just can't LOOK social. The reality though is that both AS and other autistic people can be both social and nonsocial and that you have to look past appearances and stereotypes (and manuals written entirely on the basis of how things appear to nondisabled people) in order to see that someone from either category can be either social or nonsocial. (Even people who look social aren't always, after all.)

It's almost worse when autistic people fall for these stereotypes and start making little personality-test-like versions of who's autistic and who's AS. (As in I've seen autistic people give each other things like little questionnaires to determine which category you're in.) Even if the DSM were right about tendencies, it wouldn't make it right to label all non-AS autistic people reserved and all AS people social like that. They're talking tendencies not absolutes. But they fall prey to appearances as always.)

And, also, I get sidetracked by the adverb/adjective "highly eccentric". What, exactly, does that mean? In regard to conversation. I know what it means in regard to being or doing...but how does one hold a highly eccentric conversation with another?

No. I think it should be done away with. It's just a way of saying, "I don't know what your child has."