I see. So that's already 28 gigabytes of HD space wasted. This is getting ridiculous.
It is ridiculous, but it's what we had to do to get the new version working. It also maximizes security and leaves open the possibility of having remote bitcoind/bitcoin-qt instances, etc.
That I could live with. Remote instance would be most useful so I could just dump the bitcoind (and the blockchain) to my server. Please tell more.