I would suggest for the future that a change that impacts functionality and appearance for all users ought to be discussed more widely than solely at the task requesting it. Even the most clued-in editors are unlikely to have seen this change before it went live, and this is not a strong model for modifying editor tools, even if everyone involved is working in the best of faith.

That looks better, thank you.

I see this change went live some days ago. I find it very inconvenient: a colleague made a script to reverse the effect for me as a favor. For a new editor who may not need the options linked under tools, this is a trivial change. For experienced editors who use more specific tools frequently, the reduced size of the tools button is a serious inconvenience. Important native functionality (block, protect, contributions links) are location under this option, but more importantly a large number of user-scripted functions are placed here too. On en.wiki, page swapping, SPI scripts, teahouse scripts, copyvio scripts, and several others place their buttons in this menu. Uniformity across skins seems like an improvement too minor to justify this inconvenience.

ALSO: I too reject the WONTFIX argument. If unbundled, the ability to edit cascade protected pages would be handed to a few trusted users who do not have the ability to protect pages in the normal way. If they used this user-right to bypass that restriction, it would logically be grounds for immediate removal of said user-right. Any tool is open to abuse; it is up to the community to forestall and address any such abuse.

Chiming in at the invitation of Xaosflux. If I understand the technicalities correctly, this unbundling could address a fairly frequent matter of contention, and improve the ability of some of en.wiki's most dedicated contributors to fix serious and visible issues.