When the Hexblade class was deleted, we lost a very fun build option. This isn't about losing a serious mechanical advantage, it's about devs making arbitrary changes to a class that destroyed character concepts.
The old hexblade was a source of familiar access that also granted access to discipline and full BaB. For my purposes this basically gave me a functional rogue that was strictly inferior to a more traditional build in exchange for a pet that was integral to my role playing and and creating a supernatural or magical feel to the character. This was by no means a broken or overpowered option, and with charisma to saves it played like a weaker rogue/blackguard that traded sneak attack, poison use and divine smite and the potential for other divine feats with a level 5 familiar and a hex that was basically trivial at level thirty. Having a familiar was not a balance issue. It was not something that was winning fights.
When the harbinger dropped, we were left with a strictly inferior dip class. I am not a power gamer per se. As long as I have something that resembles a build, I'm not going to whine about losing charisma to saves. I'm not going to complain about how 25 X/5 Harbinger is even worse than 25X/ 5 Hexblade was, because I was never interested in playing a 10/10 spreadsheet chad build. The loss of somewhat useful front loaded abilities was not a big deal for me and I was okay with using a somewhat weaker dip class.
What WAS a big deal was having to waste 7 levels on this class to get a familiar, because taking 7 harbinger levels is useless and hugely damaging for *most* builds.
We already have a problem with this being a twenty + year old game with an extremely limited number of pets. There's a lot of discussion about the limited pool of animal companion options on these forums and the Discord, for example (Even if you exclude my own posts, lol). Now with this Hexblade change, about a year after the -Familiar update, the dev team is taking an active step backwards.
I think we need to leave people's pets alone. People are very attached to them. IMHO, we need more pet options and not less. Weather it's in terms of different skins, or just leaving level requirements untouched.
TL;DR:
Please set the Harbinger back to where the Hexblade was with regards to getting a familiar at level 4. There is no need to engage in random gate-keeping with regards to familiar/animal companion options and making them harder to get. This is not a balance issue, it's a a matter of letting the player base do what it wants creatively. The change was completely arbitrary and is deeply upsetting to a handful of players. I understand that sometimes an old character is ruined because of necessary class balance changes. This is an accepted consequence of the team's design philosophy. But there is no serious mechanical reason behind a change like this, and there's a stultifying effect on anyone who wants to play an evil pet user. Not to mention a bizarre precedent for players who plan on using pets in the future.
We waited so many years for -familiar. We have been waiting so many years for -Animal (or whatever the rumored command will be, lol). To see these sorts of options randomly pulled away instead of expanded is just completely unjustified. No matter how marginal or obscure the build.