Drop support of too old PHP versions

What's so great about CI being MIT. Is that you are only limited by your own expertise or time.

You can right now take CI and redevelop it for PHP 5.6. There is literally nothing stopping you from doing this.

Want to move on from 5.2 and have the framework take advantage of 5.6 functions. Done.
Want to port any new work on CI at a future date to your own "CI" framework. Done.
Want to develop a fork of CI with support of namespaces, composer and all the other complaints of CI. Done also.

Why wait for other people to eventually do the work? There is a steering group, which may or may not have your own vision of where CI should go and internal politics may get in the way and delay future releases. Etc, etc. None of this occurs when its your own framework.

The great thing about PHP, is that if you don't like something. Build your own, put what you need into it and move on from there.

There really isn't that much to CI either. It shouldnt take someone very long to build it much better and much faster than it is now.