Gertrude, I agree with your statement with respect to the more obscure back-door loopholes that crop up every so often, but disabling access to attachments is bit over the top in my opinion.
It would have been better if they had introduced a pop-up message of some sort, say on first use of OE after the update, to give the user a choice. They do that with IE (e.g. auto-complete, secure sites, privacy stuff etc. , so why not with OE?).
