So far, I've heard of 2 people who use COMPAT_AOUT for its (unwanted)
side-effects. To me, that is not convincing enough to keep code in
the kernel that will confuse people by what it does when they enable
it, and which will break things too.

So, sorry, but if I do not hear from a lot of other people, I'll remove it..
You could still migrate the code to a package and use it as a module
if you really, really need it.

- Frank