Thanks for all of the interesting discussion.
Short answer seems to be - It would be hard and they would rather work on the crypto stuff, the Brave developers do not seem to think that many users care, and similar features can be restored by adding noscipt and/or umatrix.
I tested no-script (which I had previously used) and umatrix:
- NoScript has a similar interface but everyone should be aware that by default it has a whitelist that should be cleared before usage. This whitelist is weird and worrying to me.
- UMatrix has more of the behind the scenes stuff, but is very complex and powerful, but it has a very confusing interface. Do not put this on a non-power-user’s system.
Unfortunately these changes take away the only advantages Brave had for me and my organization, so I am moving on to other browsers. It is hard not to feel that I was deliberately deceived; with all of the discussion about re-enabling v1 shields there was no mention that this was the plan!