Thanks for the links. I forgot to link the JIRA ticket which started this discussion (did now). I'm still waiting on some proven security threat that can affect Openfire while still using Java 7, or even Java 6. And i'm curious which changes will improve Openfire performance/stability/etc. I would be glad, and newer version should improve something. But it can also brake something. And some users might still want to use Java 7 and still get the newest features and bug fixes. So it must be investigated by developers and carefully adopted.
I know we've just recently dropped Java 6 support in Spark, but maybe we should at least wait till Java 7 is EOL'd and Java 8 become more mature. Not sure about Java 6 though. How many users need it. There is still even a Java 5 support in there 
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Btw, Openfire is bundled with Java 7 for a long time.