You mean the same losing battle people fought against HTML 3.2, that resulted in the creation of CSS and HTML 4 Strict? Literally, just waiting for HTML 6 to deprecate 80-90% of the crap in 5 that serves no legitimate purpose. I'd actually be OK with HTML5, if they put versioning back in, promoted the use of fallback meta for when/if http response headers are missing, and got rid of all the extra pointless tags that are redundant to existing ones from 4 STRICT or have no business in a markup specification... like ARTICLE, SECTION, ASIDE, NAV, DIALOG, EMBED, PROGRESS, CANVAS... ... and I LIKE Canvas, it just has no business having a tag since it's a scripting only element; though to be fair, I'm also one of the nutjobs who thinks the various onevent attributes should be made obsolete. They have no business in the markup either since GOOD scripts should attach themselves.
I would not recommend using the base tag because it poses a security threat for it can be hijacked and then pointed to a malicious destination unknowingly to the user.
The only way to 'hijack' it would be via javascript --- and since javascript can MAKE tags I'm not quite seeing how using or not using it is any more or less secure... unless you're talking about hijacking the server side output, in which case you're pretty well shtupped regardless of what you do or do not include. Once you can make or change markup -- which would be the only way to compromise BASE, you're pretty well diggered.