Hi!
Agreed. Trying to push people to upgrade to 5.3 will be a colossal waste of time. Remember the pushes for PHP5 and to get people to drop PHP4?
None of that frustration was around MediaWiki development - we dropped PHP4 swiftly, and I guess only Jeffrey Merkey complained. ;-) If MediaWiki is better on newer PHP, we should use newer PHP.
Domas