But, but, but the Uno Punto Zero project is going to fix all that.
Of course!
I have been a fool.
You have enlightened me. Thank you, thank you.
The scales have fallen from my eyes 
IMHO, making stuff obsolete, and the process around removing things is a thorny issue. IMHO the Arduino team has made an astonishingly, good, tasteful job of dealing with thorny issues. I have total confidence in their ability to do this well too.
I don't feel pre-pending 'New' to a name is good. Do we get NewNewSoftSerial next, then NewNewNewSoftSerial, maybe New4SoftSerial? Where do the previous versions get archived?
I don't think failing to include library example code, which clearly exist, in the download is a good approach to clearly announcing that a library is deprecated. That feels wrong.
Anyway, I've tried to contribute what I can.