In the migration of Joyent's extensive node-based software stack to 0.8, we have found one of the most tedious (and enraging) issues to be the removal of 'sys' for 'util'. Yes, we know that this has been deprecated for quite some time -- but it doesn't change the fact that 'sys' has worked and that making this change was excruciatingly painful. (No, we didn't decide to assign 'sys' to the results of "require('util')" -- and if that were the recommendation, wouldn't that undermine the putative rationale for the removal of 'sys'?) To quantify the effect: we had to make thousands of changes across tens of repos -- changes that were exasperating, to say the least (with great opportunity for a slip-up that wouldn't manifest itself until, say, a critical error message resulted in an uncaught exception). History has taught us that the issues that we at Joyent experience are likely to be experienced by the broader node base; for this reason, we believe that 'sys' should be permitted as an alias for 'util' for the indefinite future.