The Tavern

If there's no longer any way to interact with corpses, then they probably shouldn't even exist anymore. I can imagine new players seeing them and spending a lot of time looking for something to do with them, thinking something along the lines of, "Surely, they must serve some purpose. Otherwise, why would the developers go to the trouble of implementing them?" Then, when they can't find anything themselves, they would turn to spoilers to try to find what they'd been missing, possibly leading them to incidentally learn other things about the game that they might have preferred to discover for themselves.

Well, they are always shown as useless (grey), so I doubt this is big danger.

Besides, I think that some effect may interact with them in the future -- the problem was not "interacting with corpses", but rather than the actual effects were not very well designed.

Blood is also a mostly flavour element and I do not think anybody complains she can not ineract with it, rather than being surprised when plays a demonspawn and finally see some interaction (if it is still in the game this way).

Ah, the travails of a game that started off as a NetHack clone and got rewritten into, well, what it is now. Reminds me of how remnants the pre-DCSS Holy spell school (healing) survived until 0.5 in the code.

FWIW, I've seen roguelikes (some 7DRLs, and I think Infra Arcana) that implement corpses the way DCSS implements blood: dead monsters leave a % (or corresponding corpse tile) on the floor, but it's not actually an item, just a cosmetic effect. IMO that's a good way to very much get across that corpses aren't something you actually interact with. As for the notion that the devs might implement something in the future with corpses: they can re-implement them if they decide to do that, it's not like the code to generate corpses goes away if it's removed or commented out.

Nevermind, I see that there is a new unrandart ("Cigotuvi's embrace") that makes use of corpses.

And, ah, did vanilla get rid of necromancy when I wasn't looking?

The necromantcy spells were changed such they do not use corpses anymore. Usually you cast the spells on the living monsters, who will turn into friendly undead upon death, without generating corpses.