As both a company who is trying to make money and as good stewards to the community I think keeping as much compatibility as possible is a good goal to have.  If R14 is broken with new code and it is hard for us to maintain going forward, then I'm fine to remove it.  If it is just removing it for the sake of cleanup, then I don't feel that's a great reason.  If someone is hitting this line of code, that means they are building from source and already outside of what we claim to support in a production sense, so I don't think that is an issue.