The choice was made for backwards compatibility. People are still running version 0.3-0.7 of bitcoind and up to this point that was not a problem. If we decided

The choice was made for backwards compatibility. People are still running version 0.3-0.7 of bitcoind and up to this point that was not a problem. If we decided the 0.8 fork was canonical we'd lose a big chunk of the userbase.