Rob Church wrote:
The problem now is that changing it could possibly cause breakage for existing uses of it,
Half of my extensions break on every new minor MediaWiki version. Sometimes the parser hooks need an extra '#' in front of them, or wfMsg() returns junk if the message is "-", or calling $wgParser->parse() in the extension breaks further montage of the final page, or the MagicWord class turns upside down, or you need to hook an extra translator for parser functions... etc.
We are already used having surprises every new minor version. Go ahead and just fix it. This is a very minor issue, fixable by changing a hook name in the extension... compared to usual breakages, this is a very simple change.