The old constructor would only have been used for advanced scenarios where the caller was manually choosing which HttpMessageHandler and IHostBufferPolicySelector to use to connect Web API with OWIN. The old constructor is bad because it doesn't do OWIN host cleanup correctly. It also can't support custom error handling/logging.
Comments: commit 5a5050be4d2b763db1573c374843da649ada9e4a
Comments: commit 5a5050be4d2b763db1573c374843da649ada9e4a