It's not that "terrible" in the first place, all things considering, and breaking people's workflow just to satisfy your preferences is just anti-user and a good way to piss off people.
The correct way to handle this, for any projects forcing the change, is to use a staged deprecation period:
* first, you add support for XDG
* second, wait at least one version to give people time to get used to it
* third, switch the config location search order so it checks XDG before .whatever
* lastly, after an announcement and deprecation period, and at least 2-3 releases, remove support for the .whatever folder.
(To be fair, it's totally possible that my upgrade path with ncmpcpp skipped over some steps and they actually did it correctly. Will have to check when I care enough to dig through commits.)
