I was one of the people who said that rpath should not be used. The
motivation was that rpath could point to NFS mounted stuff. When the
NFS mounts change later the application takes a VERY long time to
start. We all agreed this was seriously broken behaviour, and
therefore rpath should NEVER be used by default. It is only safe to
use in specific environments where the admin knows what's going on
with his build environment and the stability of the paths.