Everyone has, even the hardware vendors are treating these rules as the golden standard to which they can optimize and conform. So it's too late. But it's still a shame.
The acquire/release semantics make perfect sense for locks, because that's what it was designed for. Designing anything else with them is extremely difficult, and in practice such work tends to lean heavily on the full-barrier "sequentially consistent" primitive instead. The older read/write barrier instructions were much simpler. (And x86 is simpler still, with just one reordering rule to worry about and a single idea of serializing instructions to regulate it).
The acquire/release semantics make perfect sense for locks, because that's what it was designed for. Designing anything else with them is extremely difficult, and in practice such work tends to lean heavily on the full-barrier "sequentially consistent" primitive instead. The older read/write barrier instructions were much simpler. (And x86 is simpler still, with just one reordering rule to worry about and a single idea of serializing instructions to regulate it).