[morelisp]

They did the Emacs equivalent of adding a confirmation dialog to an action which some people do very frequently (like tens of times per minute). I think it also fundamentally breaks some rarer use cases I would have trouble explaining to non-Emacs users, but do seem somewhat valuable.

It's not clear to me from the messages I read why this can't be worked around without a hard fork, although I do agree it's an obvious bad decision to begin with, and obvious to me even as someone who barely uses this feature.

[rcthompson]

Looking at the commit diff, I don't see anything that necessitates a hard fork. The changes are all in elisp, not compiled C code. It looks like just evaluating the old version of register.el (perhaps with a few compatibility changes) in an Emacs session would revert everything to the old behavior.