That is my understanding, and the change for v30 would very much annoy me also. I know nothing about lisp but I save items to registers all the time.

I hope if this change is not reverted I can find a macro snippet that would do that extract key for me. Already in Emacs to do simple things involves lots of keys. Some I have created macros to avoid the keys, but I am not expert enough to create one for this change.