Most of what was removed was unnecessary, it makes the server fun faster with better performance and it opens it up for more stuff to be added in the future.
I bet if you asked @TinyBigJacko really nicely he'd get rid of those hats so you can get in, maybe include your player ID aswell.
It's done to stop people from loading in like 500000 items and crashing the server, nothing you can do but wait...