The title is self explanatory. In minecraft version 1.2.5, the animation that takes place when the player takes damage tilts towards the source of the damage. Ever since version 1.3 came out, and every other version after, this feature does not work. The code is still in the game. Issue #MC-26678 gives much more detail, but is marked as "won't fix", which is very disappointing. If I had known this was an issue, I would have made a bug report much sooner.

Even if Mojang is being unreasonably inflexible, and decides to still not fix an intentional feature that isn't working, a written reason why would be nice to know.