First of all, we definitely needed this. The RipeMD deprecation has been an annoying problem for some time now.
Second, not sure if this is referenced anywhere but out of curiosity why was rocksDB selected as the NoSQL Database wrapper as opposed to the popular Redis?
As far as I can tell, redis is focused on being an in-memory database, while rocksdb is more tuned for file storage. Rocksdb was introduced to lower the memory footprint of hived by moving the account history data out of memory to disk storage, so it was a natural choice.