and many shared hosting providers are still on 5.2, and many crappy old scripts require register_globals on.
"Now just marginally less braindead than every other language" isn't exactly a selling point.
Sure, it used to be worse, but I see zero commitment from PHP to actually make real steps to fixing the situation. A real first step would be to start working on a 6.x release that actually removes the gazillion deprecated-but-still-present-and-thus-used things in the language.