To clarify, from what I remember, killing linux compat was not a political decision per-se ("emulation is bad").
Rather, it is that the emulation was 32 bits-only, and more and more out-of-date so completelely useless, and also not really very maintained, so it amounted to more code with possible nasty bugs and holes, on a subsystem that wasn't useable anymore. It is very unlikely it will come back, because it would require someone to do a lot of work to actually make it useful. In my opinion, there's more chance vmm will eventually be mature enough to run a virtual linux machine than the return of userland linux emulation.