Well, Josh is right, so Patrick, put differently... I don't see any of us spending any more time and effort to develop 
_new_ processing/algorithmic capabilities for PointCloud, so if need the new processing algorithms that we are currently 
developing, then you need to switch to PointCloud2.

Cheers,
Radu.

Josh Faust wrote:
>  
> 
>     However, we encourage new users to switch to PointCloud2 and make
>     use of our Point Cloud Library (PCL) for
>     processing. At some point in the future, PointCloud and
>     point_cloud_mapping will be deprecated and removed.
> 
> 
> No we don't, as neither of them are in the boxturtle release.  There are 
> currently no stable libraries built on top of either PointCloud2 or PCL, 
> so we continue to recommend using PointCloud for now unless you require 
> bleeding edge capabilities and are willing to live with instability 
> across all the ROS libraries.
> 
> Josh

-- 
| Radu Bogdan Rusu | http://rbrusu.com/