Sure, would you mind showing me how to use CQL to insert data into an old-school style Column Family that was created with the Thrift interface?
Linus Torvalds would be up in arms if he saw this kind of client facing API breakage.
CQL is compatible with Thrift-created column families (the inverse is not true, though). Just do a DESCRIBE SCHEMA from cqlsh and see how CQL interprets a particular Thrift-created column family, then use regular INSERTs.