If it's about the new 'ghost bodies' effect; I made these a while back, and they got merged a few days ago in GIT. The aim was indeed to imitate the UT2k4 effect. However, it doesn't cause gibs to stop working, if you gib the body before it turns into a ghost (that's before the player respawns, since that's when the dead body floats away).
I think it's a pretty effect, but it can be disabled by default if that's really wanted. Generally, bodies do get to gib, since there's at least a 2 second delay between the time a player dies and the time he respawns back, giving enough time to shoot the body or for the body to hit the ground and go "splash"!
P.S. My initial patch included another change, making bodies gib at -100 health rather than -75 like before. I felt that bodies were gibing too easily. Perhaps that should be reverted, if everyone feels that bodies gib too hard now, although I feel that's a better value. Note that a dead body takes more damage than an alive player, so a grenade for instance doesn't deal the same impact to a body as it does to a player (from what I seen from my experience, if that is correct).
[EDIT] Oh, also. There was an issue in GIT a few days ago, which caused cl_gentle to happen even when the cvar was disabled. In case it's just the cl_gentle effects showing when they shouldn't, that was fixed. Please update to the latest GIT and see if everything works properly now.