Bug introduced betweenin 10.01 and 10.2, fixed in 11.1
Thank you for taking the time to send in this report. It does appear that pattern-variable renaming misses symbols within Except when using With. I will forward an incident report to our developers regarding this issue, and include the discussion in the stack exchange article.
With[{u = {f}},
HoldPattern[G[f_, Except[f_]]] :> u
]
gives
HoldPattern[G[f$_, Except[f_]]] :> {f}
I would expect
HoldPattern[G[f$_, Except[f$_]]] :> {f}
Bug?