Out of curiosity, why not? (I tried looking for past discussions, didn't find them.)
Perhaps I'm mistaken, so forgive me if I'm speaking out of turn. (The only discussions have been brief, and some were on IRC, so it's not surprising you can't turn them up.)
Basically, the OpenSSL code was put in some time ago. Since some of the distros are moving toward removing it, it doesn't seem like the best place to invest new energy. So leaving the existing code as-is is fine, but adding new code that depends on OpenSSL probably isn't. --Juan