That's certainly their prerogative, but I guess what I'm really trying to say is it's weird that they're so bent out of shape about a distro maintainer using a build option they added to their own code. Especially when said maintainer set it to the default they themselves set. If you were to download the source from github and follow the instructions in INSTALL.md which specify "Recommended CMake Build Parameters" you will end up with a binary with the exact same feature set as what the debian package now has.
>> none of these features are plugins.
I wasn't going to comment on this because it's a bit petty and is ultimately a boring semantic argument, but since you quoted it in a reply to me I will. Their CMakeLists.txt literally refers to these as plugins in the description of the XC_ALL param that was changed: "Build in all available plugins"