Phasing out the broken-workaround procps

Sure, maybe. Is your objection literally that you don't know how they're going to phase it out, or that you're worried that in fact they won't phase it out? I don't know how they're planning to do it (though the suggestion somewhere upthread of checking the runtime version of the kernel sounded plausible to me, and they can just drop it altogether in 9.04 in any case), but I'm pretty confident that they don't want to carry this annoyingness around and will find some way to get rid of it, and the exact mechanism they choose doesn't affect me, so I don't really care what it is.