It's an amusing solution, but if this ends up being anything like the missing PHP 6, it's also going to cause confusion for users. It might've been better to just mea culpa and release 3.0 anyway. I can't imagine anybody would really hold it against the author.
What's the confusion around PHP 6? - There would have been a lot more confusion due to articles, talk slides, even printed books, .. talking about PHP 6's Unicode support would have been truly confusing.
There are plenty of people with high INT and low WIS. As the old joke goes, intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put tomatoes in a fruit salad.