Drop support of too old PHP versions

Second - you conveniently ignored the preceding paragraphs when you plucked that quote out. I'll reiterate here. There's nothing stopping you from using CI with any version of PHP you want. As far as I know there's no blockers up to and including 5.6. Do whatever you want with your own code. It's a free world and depends on the needs of your project.

No I agree with you. Moving from 5.3 to 5.6 is fine. I said this in one of my other postings.

One path that I could see being viable, if the community demanded it and was willing to seriously step up and help out, would be to have a 4.0 with all of the bells and whistles, while maintaining an LTS version of 3 for older PHP versions. But the team that actually contributes and maintains the repo is extremely tiny at the moment and none of them get paid to do anything.

I agree with you, as I have said the exact same thing!

As for the rest of your post. It's totally subjective. One mans pov will differ from another even with the same project. You aren't going to please everyone. I'm starting to think these types of discussions are like fighting with the wind. The council im sure will come up with what they think is best.

I'm sure if another group want a framework which forces 5.6, the CI 4.0 version will be forked.