It's not productive and everyone loses with that attitude, because "... don't even bother asking" essentially blames others for not implementing ideas stuck in your head.
Awesome. I remember arguing for it on the mailing lists and I'm extremely happy they did this.
With echo tag you can have a very simple and powerful templating system written in the language itself. (I usually just use two methods, Temaplte::show and Template::get, which both are less than 20 lines long.)
This is being revisited as per the PHP 5.4 TODO. My guess is it'll happen this time around, and I voted against it previously (but changed said vote). https://wiki.php.net/todo/php54
