I agree the lack of stats may be quite annoying and cause issues, but my guess is the chances of backpatching such change are about 0.000001%. We have a usable 'workaround' for this - manual analyze.
My guess is that it wouldn't be too difficult to write a patch that could be safely back-patched and it's worth doing so even if ultimately the decision is not to. But then again the patch writer isn't going to be me.
Given how simple the manual workaround is not having it be manual seems like it would be safe and straight-forward to implement.
