I think I understand the comment...

I think "we could", and long term it would be nice to get away from the HCFS layer entirely, but it would require more tooling, and it's an easy win which is congruent with the other file systems which have the integration.  You could envision easy support for *Hadoop Compatible Filesystems* going this route.  

But again, long term I agree that removing the dep makes sense, and is arguably cleaner.