puri was pulled into my system by quicklisp as s dependency of drakma, and asdf was installed by portage. I have never written a line of lisp that called puri directly. No one is ever persuaded by the "it works for me" argument. The issue is real. Are you using a clean install of asdf, uiop and puri? Or are you using your development branch of asdf? Developers can always get it to work on their workstations. Maybe it's the gentoo package for asdf or uiop. Maybe slime is providing some sort of wrapping environment that affects readtables. There are any number of things that could be at play that are beyond the user's control.
Let's say you are right in saying that puri is doing something naughty by polluting a readtable. I'll go along with that. I have no reason to doubt it. I'm on your side on this issue. Nevertheless we have a problem: this code has been in the wild since 2015 or earlier. A very ubiquitous library (drakma) depends on it. Cleaning up poor behavior is a bigger job than making a fundamental and core component like asdf no longer accept the behavior. The offending libraries have to be fixed in concert with this refactoring. Established libraries cannot simply have the rug pulled out from under them.
I'm with Stas. I cannot upgrade asdf if it makes it impossible for me to use libraries that I depend on. Whatever new things asdf does are less important to me than having a working drakma. I believe just about all users would agree with this sentiment.
I'm perfectly willing to contribute to the fixing of these libraries. But let's not do it as a mad scramble. Let's issue deprecation warnings, identify broken quicklisp packages, get the bugs in those packages fixed and then implement the new asdf behavior. I'm here to help.
Carlos