We use Gift Code to track gift payment channels/gateway which is very important for us to track where gifts are from for analysis and reconciliations with bank/finance. We hope NXT created gifts will not lose any data integrity comparing to what we have got from database view.
I would have to agree; use of this field is key to our reporting processes. Without use of this field (not available) in web view we had to create additional gift attributes to enable filtering in web view. Although the attributes (custom fields) allows the information to be used in web view the fact that we have to add it twice is inefficient (redundant).