I have noticed this with echo too. In specific, the bash echo built in does not drop support for -n and -e when bash is forced into standards compliance mode as /bin/sh. That causes breakage on systems that use more strictly compliant shells when code was written against bash as sh under the assumption that either -n or -e work. I spotted a regression in Linus' tree a while back where this very thing happened in the build system for perf. Sadly, my patch to fix it was ignored:
If it is still an issue you want to fix, you may need to resend the patch periodically. It doesn't look like you got any response at all.
LKML gets hundreds of messages every day. When I used to read it I had a set of search filters to prioritize it. Anything I didn't get to I simply marked Read. There's no way to catch everything on there.
Maybe get it passed through by someone who is in Linus's email filters.
Although it's been a year and you probably don't care anymore. :)
