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I did enjoy the crows/ravens joke, so I'm not just being grumpy here, but these collective nouns are a strange thing because they're not real words. Nobody says "I saw an unkindness of ravens today." It only come up in discussions about how bizarre it is that the collective noun for ravens is an unkindness. They occupy a self-referential linguistic island. You even get a word for a group of owls (a parliament) despite the fact that owls are solitary, territorial birds that don't gather in groups. It seems a distillation of the question about whether dictionaries dictate what language means or describe how it's actually used.

That said, a relative once coined the wonderfully expressive collective noun "a collaboration of bastards."