I apologize for not being involved in this conversation, but I'm currently pulling really long work days in order to keep my head above water. As usual when that happens, CMSMS has to go to the bottom of my priority list -- it's a an unfortunate fact, but this project doesn't unfortunately pay the bills.
Anyway, I'm not sure what my specific opinion would do the change the situation. The message at the front of this thread was posted by a member of the development team, so we have to stay united on tough decisions. Unfortunately, because of the reasons listed, it has to be this way.
I see a lot of discussion about just "putting in" his changes, but it doesn't quite work that way. Nothing was accounted for in the module API to handle it, and it was hit or miss if modules would work in the first place. I think it was a neat little project, but it's not something that we can just tackle lightly, account for everything, and make sure everyone is still happy at the end and we don't make a TON of support work for ourselves.
Plus, if Alby wasn't going to have time to upgrade it to 1.9 (which is a LOT of work), then someone else would have to pick it up and do it, or it becomes another headache for us with people asking us why it's not updated, even if no one else in the dev team had anything to do with it.
We're trying to streamline operations, not make things harder for ourselves. We have a lot on our plates, and as we grow, it gets more and more difficult to keep everything going. Tons of support questions for a fork (set of patches, whatever) that we have no idea about isn't going to help anyone to keep things moving smoothly.
We will get the multilanguage stuff in. Someone will most likely make a module to emulate it for the time being (with the URL changes in 1.9, it should now be possible with core APIs), and we'll do it officially in 2.2.
Speaking of 2.x (again, something brought up a lot in this thread), I realize it's taking forever to do this, but you have to realize that we're really just a couple of PHP coders and there's a LOT to do. Efforts to get more developers involved have been mixed so far, so we're still trying to limp along with what we have and try and grow the project at the same time -- all in our free time, of which I have very little of at the moment. It's a LOT and we're doing our best, but we're stretched pretty thin. Recruit us some good PHP developers and we'll find stuff for them to do to speed it up.
I'll personally apologize that it has to be this way, but it does. Plus, I'm going to back the team on these kinds of decisions... it's just the way it is. We knew it was going to cause issues, but it's been in discussion for well over a year, and it was time to just handle it already.