Things as simple as fixing ternary associativity that has been broken and discouraged forever are basically DOA because it may break some tiny % of code that relies on broken behavior. They have a valid point that simply fixing it will break code in silent ways. So there was a possibility of making it unassociative in 7.0, throwing a warning and only fixing it for real in 5 years during the next major cycle. I don't know if this migration path will even happen.