Considering the task assigned to me was to make it properly on IE9, I don't think so. The meta tag was a piece of cake, though. It was the month or so when one person on the client's staff couldn't use it, before the client reported it to me, that was troubling.

To answer the second part of your question, it worked on IE 6/7/8 and removing the hacks would have required digging into old code. The meta tag was much quicker!