In the past, I've found it very useful to be able to subclass acs_rels, so I wouldn't like to see this feature go away. I think that we have to think very carefully before we go and rip specific features out. The current object system allows alot of flexiblity, and the flexibility should be retained if possible.
As far as the CR goes, I think there has been some exageration with respect to its problems. Because of its large API, it can seem kind of daunting, but there is nothing that prevents you from using it in a simple fashion if you so desire. There is nothing that forces you to use versioning, and If you look at how packages use the CR, you can see that quite a few of them make no attempt to use the versioning features of the CR. A better approach might be to create a CR-lite interface that allows developers to make use of the CR in a basic way without having understand all of its features.
