Sure, if we never deprecate anything then tool authors would never need to change their existing code. I don't think that's actually a viable solution though; the reason we're discussing the removal of these particular views is that they aren't really being maintained and, when they are, they're making work for us. That's certainly a trade-off to consider, of course, but in this case I'm coming down on the side of dropping support and our own maintenance costs associated with these views in favor of asking the tooling community to complete the migration to the new views which have been around for the past 10 years.
Perhaps this is naive or has been attempted in the past without success, but would it be possible to maintain a list of deprecated features? I noticed the following wiki page, (though it hasn't been updated recently) that I think could be used for this purpose.
Using this page as a model, having an "official deprecation list" that does the following might be very useful:
* Lists feature that is deprecated.
* Reason it was deprecated.
* What to use instead, perhaps with example.
* Version the feature will be removed.
Or perhaps such a list could be included as part of the official documentation? In either case, if it is well known that such a list is available/exists then tool developers, etc. should have adequate time, opportunity and information to make the appropriate changes to their products with a "minimal" impact.
