The syntax was hardly 'arcane', and I doubt it was necessary to remove these features for the purpose of streamlining the compiler, that sounds a bit ridiculous. In fact you could argue that throwing an error on functions' is actually doing more work. That really is a style thing and something best left to a linter or the like.

Evan hasn't mentioned anywhere that he's been removing features for the last year or so just to give us some big features later. If he has said that I would love to see it.