Was it because it hadn't been updated or was considered a "hacking tool"?

I mean "outdated software is unsafe" is a frequently mentioned adage; it's a good catch-all if you can't look into individual software.

Dunno, I had ethereal and tcpdump installed at the moment so I don't think so

How many hundreds of years ago was this? Ethereal has been Wireshark since 2006.

so obviously not that long ? might have been called wireshark at the time tbh :)

I had something similar when we had rewriten old application, and biggest change was move from WebSphere to Tomacat. First question we got was "What is missing in WebSpere?". Nothing is missing it had to much bloat we don't use.