I don't get it. I can't seem to find any reason why they wanted to rewrite it, and that's interesting in and of itself.

Given the language change of the past, and now a complete re-write, neither of which had any major impact on the end user, I'm wondering if we're not witnessing some sort of infatuation with coding for the sake of coding over there.

I can think of a myriad of reasons why one would want to re-write code, but they're certainly not sharing theirs.