The way the change was distributed (in a bugfix release) and (mis)communicated was completely wrong, I definitely agree with that.
As for the parsing example, yes, that's one way to implement this but definitely not the only right one -- if you care only about a couple of fields from a massive string, it depends on your application domain whether you can tolerate the additional memory bloat. What I like about the current behaviour is that the method is less surprising and more GC friendly
Oh, there are definitely other approaches to the problem I mentioned (and in fact approaches which are better than the naive split even under Java 6). Changing it out from under people should have been done a lot more carefully, though.
