I'm not opposed to removing stuff which is really, truly, obsolete, but I am concerned about removing useful functionality and never adding it back (c.f. gnome-screensaver, which destroyed the functionality xscreensaver offered and never restored it — it's been over a decade and gnome-screensaver is still not a replacement for xscreensaver!).

A good part of my concern hinges on the definition of 'obsolete.' Code for handling multi-byte characters on black-and-white Macintoshes? Probably obsolete. BBDB? Stagnant but not obsolete (it's sad, incidentally, that it is stagnant, but that's a post for another time).