I think I was not very clear and transformed Dan's words too much.
No, I've read that mail, and I reflected to point 2. (which I may misinterpreted: probably Dan don't like them on _upgrade_? Btw, packagers: we have pre/post_install and pre/post_upgrade "scriptlets").
I just talked with him and we agree on these two things : 1) printing optdepends is fine. I actually asked an user to write a feature request : http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/10630 , and I even assigned it to me. But then I ran into annoying problems. Please help, since you care about this issue. Hm. I've missed that FR, thanks.
2) messages like "check .pacnew file for new options" are useless. pacman already prints a warning when extracting pacnew files anyway. And you said yourself it might be overkill, so it shouldn't be a problem.
OK. No problem, I wasn't sure about it neither. I just noted, that some "lazy" users may notice behaviour change (missing SyncFirst option) after upgrade. Bye