The rationale behind this will be included in the release notes for 4.3.
tl;dr: users all over the world need fonts which support their language
and things like right-to-left just are not possible without xft.
</li>
<li>
The usual elitism amongst minimal window managers: Don’t be bloated, don’t be fancy
- (simple borders are the most decoration we want to have), don’t add support for Xft
- and blurred fonts.
+ (simple borders are the most decoration we want to have).
<br />
However, we do not enforce unnecessary limits such as a maximum amount of source lines
of code. If it needs to be a bit bigger, it will be.