Folks, Chu is the Secretary of Energy, not Treasury. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Chu.

Our annual survey of the Internet's DNS infrastructure measures (among other things) the percentage of a random sample of com, net and org subzones that use SPF. In the October 2009 survey, we found that 12.2% of the sample used SPF records. For more information, see http://dns.measurement-factory.com/surveys/200910.html

I beg to differ. BIND 9 isn't worse at reading zone data files, it's just much stricter. If it wouldn't read your zone data files, that's likely because you were taking advantage of BIND 8's sloppy zone data file parsing to do something illegal like attaching multiple CNAME records to the same owner name.