I agree a lot of people would get real emotional, just think about the angry threads on the steam forum, HOWEVER, this is Hawken BETA.
I think everyone would be better off to accept that Hawken is not a finished product, that there are bugs and glitches and balance issues and that things might be changed.
Let's examine this line of reasoning.
Hawken is not finished. More stuff needs to be changed and added.
The first major change in content that is playable under the new devs is the removal of an item.
As was said before, Hawken needs a lot of work and had remained relatively stagnant. People want new content, so, as of now, removal of an item that's been around for a long time is not "building up" the game. It's removing something. I'm not saying it absolutely should not be removed, just that it shouldn't be removed now, especially since issues with radar balance are not exclusive to the scanner.
It actually might keep the game interesting because something significant actually happened in the course of over a year.
No, it wouldn't really make it much more interesting to remove an item. It might change the playstyles of people who use scanners heavily (I hardly use them myself), but overall it's unreasonable to say that the game becomes more interesting when one removes things and make no changes.