As the author of h.mut, I feel qualified to say its time has come. We use chat for too many things: using chat to keep track of the health of your team's flagholder doesn't make much sense, nor does relying on a mutator for a feature so important to such a popular gamemode. I'd prefer that information to live in the HUD somewhere. What should that look like?

I think this can be underneath your health, maybe translucent health bar with a teamcoloured name. I also thought of the flag sprite, but I think it's more valuable to have it show the name just like F9. If it were the flag sprite it may be confusing, Because... what colour do you show? Your team colour or the enemy captured flag? A flag can't have health, so it wouldn't instantly communicate that it's the health of a teammate.

I like the idea of integrating this information in the HUD in general, but I think one issue that may arise is that it becomes hard to track sudden changes to their flagholder's health. People are used to observe teamchat for these kind of sudden changes, but I'm not sure how that would work in the HUD. We would have to make sure that a change to the flagholder's health is easily noticeable even when you're in the middle of action. At least chat is easily trackable since it stays for some seconds unless there is heavy spam.