[Bf-taskforce25] Blender spring cleaning

[William Reynish]

Hi All,

Now that spring time is upon us, it's a nice opportunity to do some  
cleaning up in Blenders functionality. Over the years, some features  
have been superseded by others 2.5 is a good release to make some  
clean cuts, now that forward compatibility is out of the window.

Certain features have been replaced by better alternatives, but until  
now the older implementations haven't been removed yet. We have things  
like 'Old Track' and 'CurveFollow' controls which have been replaced  
by more flexible constraints instead. Keeping these old features is  
really just adding bloat, and confusing to the end user.

The reason they've been kept until now has been to ensure a transition  
period, but really these features have been redundant since what,  
2003? It's about time we have the guts to just go ahead and remove  
them. Yes, in the short term it's annoying to have features disappear,  
but in the long run we'll have a better, cleaner Blender.

When talking about outdated features, I'm specifically thinking about  
these for now:

Curve animation (superseded by the Follow Path constraint)
Old Track (superseded by the Track To constraint)
Render windows placement controls (useless really, and irrelevant as  
Blender renders using the image editor by default)
'Do Composite' (There are at least three ways of turning on and off  
the compositor. There's the 'Use Nodes' button in the compositor  
itself, you can make a direct link from the RenderLayer to the  
Composite node, and you can use the 'Do Composite' button. There's too  
much redundancy here.)

These are the ones I could think of off the top of my head, but I'm  
sure there are probably more? Anyone else have suggestions for  
features in need of a little cleaning out?

It's a nice time to fight back against bloat and feature creep.

Cheers,

-William