I know that they're all working documents, but the thing is, some bits have gotten up and started working, and once they've started working, they'll tend to stay working, I bet. That's really an aside, though.

I'm just curious as to what the train of thought was to drop something small and relatively compact and that had decent symmetry with other operators, and move to a minimum 5 character op (for simple tasks), which seems Huffman cruddy.

I think you mean this.