From my understanding, today if I have to use an anchor link, I have to include the pageName as part of the url when pointing to a specific custom anchor name.
For example, http://myconfluence.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=54689987#Test-page1!-anchor

where Test-page1! is the name of the page

For me the whole point of using pageId or tinyLink or anchor link is to be able to link to the page without having to worry about the changes to the title or the headings within the page. If the url to the anchor must include the pageName, it seems to break the point of using pageId or tinyLink

I think the only way the anchors will be useful is if they are quite separate from the page system, meaning that the link only identifies the anchor (which may very well have a global ID, that identifies the space it is in also) so that the link would work internally as well as externally. 

For example, today I have written a document in confluence that is built out of Jira tickets. IN the tickets I want to link to pages in the document. But, if I use the external link, a new window will open when I click the link even though I am in that document already. If I then use local links instead, clicking the link in Jira would not transport you into the document in Confluence (which is what I want).

So, make the Anchors into a separate thing that links to a part of a document. The links should transport you within a document when found in that document, but if found outside of the document (on an external web page or in JIRA) then they should open in a new window/tab and go to the correct place in the document, without having to rewrite the URL.

As a suggestion, maybe you can get the anchor itself to create the correct URL to reference it if you click it once inserted into the document.

It would also be nice to just be able to copy/paste an anchor link from Confluence into Confluence link and have it work properly, instead of breaking and sending to the top of the page. The ability to search and select an anchor link from a page would be so useful to our teams. 

I expected anchors to be universal, or at least space-specific, not per-page. Failing to include the page reference when linking to an anchor results in a link that appears functional but does nothing when clicked, without an error message or indication that the link is broken.

By the way, I cannot agree with the label you have used for this. "small-improvement" does not adequately evaluate this feature, especially as it would not be unreasonable to think that the effort required to implement it should be manageable.

What I would like to see as a solution would be this:

When I insert a link and use the Search or Recently Viewed option to indicate a valid page in the same site there should be a button (which should be previously greyed out) which would become active labelled  List Anchors. Clicking on this would populate a zone of the UI with the list of anchors and you would just need to click on the anchor you need.

Alternatively, once the valid page has been chosen you could automatically populate a UI box or pull-down menu to choose the anchor.

In either case, the implementation shouldn't be rocket science. I cannot understand how this basic feature is not already a standard part of Confluence. It is really really needed.

This would be a really nice improvement.

Note: the ideal thing would be that when you type [ in the editor, anchors are part of the selection list that you get.

The current mechanism for linking to anchors is so cumbersom as to be unworkable in many instances.

For example, if I have a table of requirements, I want to be able to link to the relevant row from different places. That means an anchor on each row ID in the table. It doesn't take many requirements before it gets unworkable to try linking back to them having to type in the page name and anchor name to make the link.

This is also a big issue when linking to headers that act as an anchor.

Also, when an anchor is removed/changed, there is no easy way to know the link is no longer valid. Or even better, if the link would update automatically like links to pages.