I don't know any other reason than that some people do not like things like Counterparty to be used in Bitcoin network. And that's exactly (as Friction has been saying several times) is the chance for IXCoin. We can offer almost the same crucial feature (security), and instead of obfuscating the use of of protocols like Counterparty, we welcome them!

For the second question, I think update is needed only for the OP_RETURN feature to be enabled. So I think originally the idea was to get the pools to update to the current version, but if I recall right, Friction said that OP_RETURN is not enabled in the current version (as it was supposed to be). So we need a new version of the client. When doing that, we could also increase the 80-byte limit (especially if it makes sense from the counterparty implementation point of view) as opposed to bitcoin decreasing(?) it!