Hello,
When the feature was added, it wasn't extensively tested. I didn't want to throw a major change into the gears without knowing the side-effects. So far, I've not heard of any.. so it could be made the default, on the assumption that all of our httpd boot scripts contain the "graceful" option, which I'm pretty sure they do. The only one I found that didn't was for apache 1.3 with FreeBSD.. it did have "graceful" in the boot script, but it just did a full stop/start. I won't be setting it as the default for this release with all of the changes already made (don't want a huge pile of potential problems all at the same time), so we can look at it for a future release.
John