Would it not be possible to get some polls of who is using which FPC versions and decide then? Personally, I think that if we're making a new engine for the future, it'd be a contradiction to not use some newer features for the sake of backwards compatibility. A couple years down the line, I don't think it'll be very likely we'll alienate people from the engine on account of them not being able to get their hands on a copy of delphi newer than 7 or fpc 2.6.2 (I think it was?).

At a glance it looks like it complicates things and almost causes us to work around a feature just to provide support for what is already considered old software (delphi 7 has been around as long as I can remember) which is already pseudo-irrelevant and will only become more so as times goes on.