Comment 7 for bug 112909

SabreWolfy, I think you need to re-read this bug. It has nothing to do with the filesystem itself supporting extended attributes. Rather the problem is with all the user-land tools that do not, like cp, tar, graphical file managers, etc.

Without these tools supporting them, filesystem support is useless in most situations. Of course, only Apple is stupid enough to design software that won't work without them and depends utterly on this metadata being preserved, which is why the issue does not arise more commonly. There wouldn't be that much need for the support otherwise.