I'm not a proponent of the sudden removal of COinS, which I opposed (I
had a hand in introducing COinS to many templates on Wikipedia)
I am a proponent of a citation microformat, which could sit alongside
COinS and, perhaps, /eventually/ replace it.
If you could put your concerns online, perhaps in a blog post, I'll
bring it to the attention of those concerned and see if we can't get
the removal reversed; or accelerate the microformat proposal.
A.