Hi,
I think this mass removal was a bad idea, and I would like to see it reverted. As far as I can tell, it removes backward compatibility for versions of MediaWiki less than 1.16 - it just seems way too premature to do that, for a very negligible performance increase.
-Yaron
Agree, needs revert. I'll start a wikitech-l discussion, since this basic dispute has come up before.