For FC5 I agree with that of course, since we're nearing the end of the FC5 devel cycle. Once FC6 development begins however, it would be a prime time to make this change to rpm in rawhide so that everyone who relies on the current behaviour will have plenty of time to fix their scripts.
Then, if it appears there are still a lot of broken scripts out there as FC6 nears, we can change it back to the current query results for FC6, and then re-change it for FC7 development.
The end goal being a migration from what it reports now, to what we would like it to report in the future, with plenty of time for people to fix broken scripts that don't formulate their own --qf queries.
This allows forward progress, while minimizing problems, and providing a migration path.
Alternatively, we could discourage the use of rpm as a command itself and push people toward using repoquery. repoquery acts on local rpmdb's as much as repositories.
and repoquery's default format is: name-epoch:ver-rel.arch
-sv