Re: completing-read in E21

[Richard Stallman]

    Can anyone tell me why this nice feature of completing-read is
    considered deprecated and what to use instead to get the same functionality?

It is annoying to put initial input in the minibuffer.  Now that we
have the minibuffer history, the user can pull the default value into
the minibuffer with M-n.  It is much nicer to specify it only as the
default, and let the user decide whether to pull it into the
minibuffer.