Jim M

Considered and decided against it faster than a quantum computer could have managed it.

Already in v5.
I think the sensible thing to do is wait for all the news of v5 to come out and then make an informed decision on your future. Trying to extrapolate v5 from a few dev blogs may lead to rash decisions.
I'd love to keep you as a customer, but if you do wish to move to xF then on the plus side you won't need to worry about new versions and there being significant changes in your future. 😄

For now.. dum dum duuuuuuuuum. We have no plans to remove it.

The capability to change how most stuff in IPS works and enhance it with own features/apps isn't going away.
What changed is how things have to be done. Some changes will be much easier, others will be probably annoying as hell for people who are used to how the hooks worked in v4, some will think that it is a huge step backward, but as Matt said, it had to be done, to provide a much more stable and faster-improving code base for v5, because we'll be able to alter or even deprecate methods, method parameters and even deprecate complete (internal) classes much faster, which also 3rd parties and clients will benefit from.
With v5 I'm really expecting fewer "A new community release with some huge under-the-hood BC breaking changes is here, all my apps are now broken and need to be updated ASAP" scenarios.
 
Code listeners are a quite common pattern used in modern applications, most php framework use this approach today. It's the perfect balance between none capability to change the core behavior via 3rd party code and the too-powerful proxy autoloader which we had in 4.x, which as powerful as it was, had also way too many problems.
I've read about concerns about missing event locations which were common in v3 and that it took ages to have new hooks implemented => Keep in mind that we have now a monthly release cycle, so I'm quite sure it's not going to take now that long to ship improvements as long as they make sense and fit into the general vision of the product.

1. You should all cool down and wait for the upcoming news and also the final product before getting in such a  panic rage.
2. Please see my reply in the SEO topic:
3. See the first point. We're listening to feedback and implementing changes based on it, just like Esther and Matt implemented changes today based on the provided feedback.
4. I think you're all way too scared.
There's still so much that can be done, it's 2023, and there are other ways and solutions than to edit files..
ALPACAS! I'll repeat very very slowly just for you: AL PA CAS

💩

He will stare at me without blinking until I add in new tools. He can be quite scary.

We literally changed code this morning because of your feedback on adding a listener to base classes. 🤔