I like the new policy, which seems to be one potentially disrupting new technology per major release. Previously, major releases tried to do too much at once, which lead to some very unstable and sometimes alienating .0 releases.
Emacs always had anti-aliased text if you used it within a terminal that had it.
I never missed anti-aliased text that much - there are plenty of good fonts that render well without it. Now that it has, it looks much better. However, the idea of giving up its power in order to get pretty fonts with a lesser editor is ludicrous.
What changed to go from releases every 4-7 years, to releases every 1-2 years?