Re: With the dropping of a few features from IBM i are there vendor software concerns?

If IBM no longer delivers any "unsupported" applications with each new version/release, when/if IBM changes the hardware (PowerXX) in some way that requires IBM i (SLIC)  to re-encapsulate all program objects, customers will be unable to use those applications any longer.

Customers must keep older copies of those now unsupported tools on the system, e.g. when upgrading from one release to the next, and the corresponding program objects are "Observable information . . .*NONE" as is the case for many IBM-supplied objects.  

For example, for DFU, if you issue:

   DSPCMD UPDDTA

you see the command processing program is QZDCMDP -- issuing:

   DSPPGM QDZCMDP

you can see it says:  Observable information . . . : *NONE

So this could be a real issue if IBM changes the underlying technology (Power processors) in a way that is not 100% upward-compatible with existing processors, or if IBM decides to change some other "internals" in some way that requires re-encapsulation of all modules, programs and service programs.

Prior to removing those products from distribution, IBM should distribute versions with all creation data (observability) intact, so that they could be recreated automatically by the OS (SLIC) if needed.