> Clearly your opinions differ from the majority of the web community.

> Why do you think we now have document.querySelectorAll?

This is called "argumentum ad populum" (appeal to popularity). The advent of jQuery caused clueless "developers" (along with library authors) to beg for "native" selectors. QS(A) is the result. They were never needed in the first place.

> Why? ie5.5 is 12 years old.

Internet Explorer's Quirks Mode (which still exists in IE 9) is a simulation of IE 5. It's useful for testing against IE's old box model.