As weighted pressure plates have to be changed now that the decision about this gamerule seems final, please participate in a discussion in this Reddit-thread here what your ideas for a change for weighted pressure plates would be so they'd be of use again for the technical community.

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1.11 will introduce the new gamerule "maxentityCramming" which will be "ON" by default and set to "24".
With this default-ON-gamerule not more than 24 entities at one time will be able to be in one spot, more than 24 will suffocate and die.

"maxentityCramming" is a pure performance gamerule.
While it is very useful for the Creative community and also for servers which suffer from entity lag, it should be set to "0" by default = OFF.

Reasons
As it's only a performance gamerule, servers and singleplayers who use commands should set the amount of wanted entities in one spot on their own account, if they want to do so.

As there are also players and servers though which are "dedicated decidedly Vanilla Survival" and do not make use of any commands including gamerules as this would go against "Vanilla Survival", this will force them to play with that gamerule and its 24 default entities in one spot.

Those Vanilla players and servers will not be able anymore to e.g. make proper Elytra boosters, Elytra Launcher stations across their world (mainly Overworld+The End dimension), which will be a negative change for those Vanilla players and servers and their infrastructure by losing this awesome feature.

Elytra is very much loved, but only with Elytra Launcher stations they can be really enjoyed and can be practically used on Vanilla Survival servers and Singleplayer worlds.

As 24 entities will basically never be in one spot without a player being responsible for it, "maxentityCramming" gamerule should be OFF by default, as it's only really useful for non-Vanilla-servers and the Creative Tech community. If a player is willingly responsible for the accumulation of mobs in one spot, it's up to their decision how to deal with possible lag and, dependent on the quality of their hardware, set maxentityCramming accordingly. If a player willingly accumulates mobs in one spot and does not want to use that gamerule, it is, including possible lag, also their very own decision. This highly individual adjustment and decision should not be pre-made for them.

Again: The gamerule can absolutely help servers regarding their performance if they want to.
Servers that use plugins and/or commandblocks do have admins who also know commands well enough and can set "maxentityCramming" themself if they see the need for it.

Also, what are *iron pressure plates then still for?*

An iron/heavyweighted pressure plate changes the signal strength it gives off depending on the number of entities on it.
Signal strength of 15 is reached with 141+ entities.

The default of 24 entities with the "maxentityCramming" gamerule renders them pretty much useless, even more so as golden/lightweighted pressure plates detect only up to 15 entities.

There was the argument that at least those pressure plates would work as intended for those people who use commands to turn off that gamerule.
As the technical community is the main target group to use these pressure plates, and as those who really can make use of those pressure plates are nearly all "decidedly Vanilla" players who would never use commands for their Vanilla worlds, it makes no sense to deprive them from making use of those pressure plates, as they are nearly the only ones using them in the first place, as highly technical players with "many entities being crammed in one spot intentionally".

I'm not a native English speaker so I cannot word it so well like SkylinerW can, whose comment over on Mojira-Reddit I will thus mostly quote, as he mentioned many things I and some of my technical-player-friends I showed it agree to:

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Regardless of if the gamerule's primary objective is to boost performance or affect gameplay, it's not taking into consideration that it's blocking another feature that already existed.

Why have weighted iron plates in the game if, by default, 12 of its 15 states cannot be used without cheating?
Not to mention that gold plates already encompass some of the remaining available states for iron, even further reducing the usefulness.

A singleplayer-playing, cheats-off player taking notice of the useless weighted plate feature has no way of fixing it without using a third-party tool, which does not mean that that player knows that such tools exist and how to use them. Nor does that necessarily mean they are even aware that there is a way of fixing it.
Driving the player to using a third-party tool to fix a feature (that was previously fully available and could otherwise have been defaulted to fully available) is not something that should happen.

That also does not mean that players should "learn" to enable cheats on world creation.
Enabling cheats is optional, not a requirement for being able to fully access all survival features.
Weighted pressure plates were not cheating, after all.

The primary issue I have with it is that a cheat, by default and with no recourse for some, blocks a survival feature that was previously accessible, and requires cheating or (for some) requires third-party tools to access it again.

Keep in mind that weighted plates are not restricted to the technical community.
Everybody has access to this feature, not just a single sub-community, so it does impact everybody (including non-technical players following a tutorial that makes use of weighted iron plates).

An existing and intended feature (weighted iron pressure plates) is being hindered by default for everybody and requires cheats to access them fully again.

Possible solutions to this issue are to change the default value of the gamerule up to the highest value that iron plates can detect.
The popular solution is to change the default of the gamerule to 0 and let players/server admins decide when to use it, while iron plates become fully accessible again.

However, none of those solutions work when the gamerule is changed.
What would probably be an unpopular solution is to remove iron plates entirely, since in their current state, they are near-useless.

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I'd like to add to SkylinerW's last sentence here that a removal of weighted pressure plates in favour of the "maxentityCramming" as default-on-gamerule would not only make all technical contraptions which make use of them void, but I'm sure that the reaction of the community would be even more negative than it already is, and they'd oppose that gamerule in the way it is planned of being implemented even more.

Furthermore, as we can see in MC-107171 this gamerule is bugged, entities also take too much damage etc., so it needs to be changed anyway already.

Possible Compromise
As suggested by Torabi:

I personally could live with that, but I'm not going to have the arrogance to want to decide this for everyone, I only try to mediate between the community and Mojang/Microsoft.
Thus:

Addition to the compromise
Upon creating a world in 1.11+, one could have an option to chose whether maxentityCramming should be OFF/0, or default/24, or, if also possible, inserting an individual value.

In order to figure whether or not the community would be fine with Torabi's idea, I created a poll.

Poll for "worlds created prior to 1.11 should have "maxentityCramming" default-off"
https://twitter.com/LapisDemon/status/784755247596134401

If there is an important reason which I don't see, why "maxentityCramming" was introduced as default-on with the value of 24, and not as an option, please do tell.
On which grounds has it to be "on" and set to "24"?

I know many not only Vanilla Survival players would like Mojang to reconsider adding this gamerule in 1.11 as default "on".
If possible code-wise and if the community would be fine with it, please consider adding some sort of gamerule-selection for this for worlds being created in 1.11+.

Thank you in advance for considering it.