What are the benefits of using Grub2 over Grub?

Why would one move from Grub to Grub2?

GRUB 2's major improvements over the original GRUB include:

• New configuration file structure
• Scripting support including conditional statements and functions
• Dynamic module loading
• Rescue mode
• Themes
• Graphical boot menu support and improved splash capability
• Boot Ubuntu LiveCD and some other ISO images directly from hard drive
• Non-X86 platform support (such as PowerPC)
• Universal support for UUIDs (not just Ubuntu)
• Improved internationalization, including support for non-ASCII characters

Grub legacy is no longer being maintained, so distros would have to do all the work of patching it to support newer file systems like Ext4 and btrfs. That's a lot of really unnecessary work for them, and diverts dev time away from doing more useful things.