I don't think so. Not because I need this feature. (I could implement it by myself actually.)
I thought the one I mentioned is much earlier (about several months) than the one you have noticed, the php WYSIWYG editor class.
That's not the point. The point is to add this as an official add-on or a built-in feature, so that everyone did not required to adopt the codes each time a new version was released.
If that was an optional feature, then you can switch it off if you want a faster page browsing. That's not a big problem.
Or if you're much care about the page size, then you might prefer not to use even the HTML / markup features at all and keep all your messages away from any extra tags other than a pure text. IMHO.
