Hi Jack,

It is needed for supporting some of the Kinect variants, not all of them work with OpenNI. It's also been a little easier to support exotic computing platforms with this driver. I'd prefer to keep the Kinect support for the TurtleBot for now. 

There is a rosdep for libfreenect-dev https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/blob/master/rosdep/base.yaml#L1483 which I hope could replace the libfreenect ros package. http://wiki.ros.org/libfreenect but is not necessary. 

I hope rereleasing will be just a few minutes since there's been no changes for a long time and we can just move on.

We chose for the TurtleBot maintenance load to only do the LTS releases which is why we didn't push to have this released into Jade.