My train of thought is that the setgid bit isn't inherently necessary to make cat files work - it was added before my time as maintainer with an unsatisfying explanation, and I've long been intending to look into it properly - and the cron job was there to work around a problem that was never fully diagnosed. IOW, neither of these issues are central to cat files. I plan to pare these things away, but I need to do some auditing to make sure that I'm not going to break anything else in the process.
My train of thought is that the setgid bit isn't inherently necessary to make cat files work - it was added before my time as maintainer with an unsatisfying explanation, and I've long been intending to look into it properly - and the cron job was there to work around a problem that was never fully diagnosed. IOW, neither of these issues are central to cat files. I plan to pare these things away, but I need to do some auditing to make sure that I'm not going to break anything else in the process.