Thanks for the quick feedback everyone. Of course we would have liked to avoid this situation altogether, but anyone who is familiar with phasing out legacy systems knows what kind of unfortunate obstacles can arise. Allow me to explain this in a little more detail, at the risk of ending up in a bikeshedding discussion. :)

Currently, tickets are being signed by a very old server, running an unsupported legacy OS and GNUPG1. In the beginning of the year, we tried phasing this server out and handle signing from one of our standard platforms running GNUPG2. That box signs emails very well, however our legacy ticketing refuses to play nice with it. We spent many, many hours on getting it our ticketing system to behave, but to no avail. The result was that we rolled back to the old solution, followed by this announcement:

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-services-wg/2013-January/001968.html

The proposal to discontinue ticket signing would be a temporary measure to allow an easier transition. That's all we're asking for.