Yes, intentionally starting to deprecate hatch, in favor of "new Turtle".  The first step is to remove it from the documentation.

The reason is that, in classrooms, "hatch 100" doesn't work visibly the way kids would expect it to.  They don't see 100 turtles (even though they get 100 turtles) because they all hatch in the same place, on top of each other.  All that the kids see is that they get a very dark turtle that doesn't animate very smoothly.  Also, jquery's multiple-selected items (as returned from hatch N) are not as useful lesson to learn as ordinary Javascript arrays.

So it's better to just have kids use "t = new Turtle" and then put it in a loop if they want several.