It was my intention to suggest that unintentional breakage of existing setups should be avoided, not that removing the filter table was some evil plot. ;-)That is a most practical suggestion.If not, then shouldn't the filter table be obsoleted to avoid confusion?That would probably confuse people. Just don't use it if you don't
need to.
The problem is that people think they are safe with the filter table, when in fact they need the prerouting chain to seal things. Right now this is only possible in the mangle table.I'm not sure what you think is unsafe about using the filter table, and the order of evaluation issues certainly seem to suggest that some actions would take a major rethink at least. Perhaps you could avoid breaking all of the setups which currently work, rather than force everyone to do things differently because you feel that your way is better.