Haunted by ancient history

I have - but the cost is too high. There's very little cost in keeping this code indefinitely - it won't get any better and new drivers might not work properly with it, but it certainly won't get any worse.

Using the old API in the new tools is just going to get it wrong anyway - there are 20 or so API versions of wext after all that all need to be treated slightly differently (they didn't care all that much for backward compatibility when those were designed ....)

So no, this isn't going to happen.

You should probably just use "iw wlan0 scan" and "iw wlan0 link" instead. Doing anything beyond those two commands with the command line is mostly not going to do what you want it to anyway.