Yeah, I don't buy this "we just hid the nice way behind an option" explaination, I've been stung by that too many times to ignore it..
It means "this gonna get dead" and the argument will be "oh, nobody uses it" yeah, because, you can only want a nice thing back if you knew it existed to begin with, eventually, most users either never knew it was there, or assumed it went away, and eventually, forget it entirely, and then it's gone.
I don't think you have to worry about settings disappearing in newer releases.
Which, major releases of Gimp are so slow anyways, if it was a realistic worry for this software specifically (it's not), it would probably be 10+ years before such a change hit stable.
It means "this gonna get dead" and the argument will be "oh, nobody uses it" yeah, because, you can only want a nice thing back if you knew it existed to begin with, eventually, most users either never knew it was there, or assumed it went away, and eventually, forget it entirely, and then it's gone.