For what it is worth I signed the necessary copyright assignment papers years ago. I have been a member of the Emacs project since Wednesday, November 13, 2002. If you go to the Emacs Project Memberlist page you will see me listed as Ben Key <bkey1>. I simply have not been an active contributor to Emacs for the past several years.
I also have been very busy at work for the last several weeks and have not had a chance yet to make the various suggested name changes to the functions and variables. In fact I am on a business trip now, the second in 3 weeks.
I do not mind what Ted has done though.
I do think it is important to trap errors though. If you do not, and you call this new load directory function in your .emacs file, Emacs initialization will abort at the first error leaving your Emacs session half configured (any code positioned after the call to load directory will not run). I do not think this is a good idea. I do not feel very strongly about this though.