IIRC it was accurate dithering that led to moving it to a post process effect rather than object-level (had issues dithering between colours, and didn’t play nicely with transparency).
Wasn’t overly happy with cutting per-object dithering, but it was a relatively obscure hardware feature to begin with (so far you’re the first person to bring it up). Hopefully we’ll be able to get it back in 4.0 by rendering to a buffer to mask dithering, AFAIK that should do the job.