While helping troubleshoot the bug before the release, I got the impression that Text handling was always a second-class feature of inkscape - it's never had the attention it needed to be considered a reliable professional tool. Advice for clunky workarounds has become how it works (jiggle it with the arrow keys so it saves properly, for example).
There was some attention paid to fixing the tool, just not enough paid to making sure old template files still work, and fixed automatically upon the next save.
All this is much easier said than done. I guess I just accepted that old templates were not going to show properly for this release, because I really appreciate the progress that has been made to making the tool more usable.
And that's what I hear from people who use inkscape for templates in the GNOME project- They are simultaneously upset that the old templates don't show correctly, but "at least the text tool is more usable now"
So I guess going forward it makes sense to assign a higher priority to the text features of inkscape as well as a backward compatibility for previous templates, to bring them up to speed with the necessary changes to the text tool, without the need for dialogs.
My 2p
-C