The original reason is because clj-http makes it almost impossible to configure SSL using our pem files.  There are many, many places in many, many projects where we need to make HTTPS requests using our certs, so we decided we needed an abstraction layer to handle this.  That's where puppetlabs/http-client comes in.

Since that exists and is going to be our recommended library for our projects to use to make these kinds of HTTPS requests, I'd just like to eliminate the handful of places that we are still using clj-http so that we're being consistent and not dragging around a bunch of extra dependencies.

Also, since puppetlabs/http-client is relatively new, I'd like to get some extra mileage on it.

All of that said, this is not an urgent priority.  This PR is something that I hacked together over the weekend and do not plan to spend much time on it during business hours; you are correct that it's not technically blocking anything.