Frank Mittelbach writes:

 > i nevertheless begin to wonder if we should change the default font
 > encoding from OT1 to T1 so that more people get proper hyphenation
 > without the need to say
 >
 >   \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
 >
 > in their documents and would be interested to hear what the opinion on this
 > list would be (not that i consider this list a representative sample of the
 > average LaTeX user).

I vote against, strongly. If you make a major change like this to
standard LaTeX, but do not offer major *new* facilities, you will
simply alienate 2000000 people around the world... that is to say, all
those people whose documents stop working cos they don't have T1 CMR
fonts. No, they don't have EC fonts, and don't want them 'cos they are
not Type1 :-}

from the grave, Sebastian