Yes, absolutely could be and this was something I debated over.  In the end I felt changing it was the best option. My reasoning for doing so is-

1. cfa8e76 adds the functionality that people will mostly be looking for with kafka (which isn't easy to do with the existing interface).  Specifically it makes it easy to:
   * consume from start of topic (great for testing or seeding data)
   * pick up where consumer group left off
   * start consuming new events only (it was easy for us to overwhelm the block generator if a driver has been down for maintainance for an extended period of time. Though this was partly caused by the mem leak in the MessageHander)

2. The current implementation has a dependency on a private kafka class (ZookeeperConsumerConnector).

3. With cfa8e76, I don't see a real need to keep initialOffsets around from the user perspective.

That is my 2 cents at least =)  I will let you have the final say.  I am happy to tweak this further of course.