Nope, Speed Dial is more complete as a bookmarks replacement than Stash. Yet listen, I know it isn’t anything compared to classic bookmarks but it’s what’s closer (by a huge margin, but closer, at least it has one level deep folder structure).
I don’t need bookmarks (nor sessions) now that Speed Dial has folders. I organized my links one level deep just fine and I’ve aways reached them by typing part of URL/title in the address field anyway. But that’s of course my usage and I understand how other people want to have more sub-folders, nicknames, a bar, a manager, etc.
You wonder who made the decision… Well somebody that considered more than 90% of the users didn’t use bookmarks (or nicknames, or the bookmarks bar, etc – according to the usage statistics collected) and thought about making the tools the browser offer less redundant (Bookmarks and Speed Dial serve to save links = redundancy), somebody who thought that perhaps bookmarks were being less and less used specially with the advent of web apps, etc. The decision wasn’t accepted by some who showed how their usage is prejudiced without a bar/button to quickly open saved links in the current page without having to navigate in the Speed Dial UI, without nicknames, etc, then they decided to redevelop bookmarks natively in the browser.
Contrary to what FavBrowser is reporting, the bookmarks feature is one priority (one of the many) and you can see that they’re advancing starting with the implementation of the bookmakrs bar (A.K.A. quick access bar). But people can’t expect their “pet bug” to be fixed while other people have other demands, so bookmarks isn’t the sole and highest priority of Opera right now.
Now, comparing IE 4 with Opera 15+? It makes no sense please stop.