That's a bummer Don. Maybe if the community keeps pinging the PG team we can get it.
I noticed that the %TYPE patch for PL/pgSQL was included in 7.2 because of community pressure (on which we played a role) and because the patch was good too, of course.
I wasn't proposing asking folks to compile custom-versions. That'd require an initdb and all. So I agree with Jonathan and you too.