>My crontabs aren't user owned, anymore than my passwd file is. 
>Crontabs are owned by root. (Unless you do custom things)

sorry, that wasn't very clear.

user crontabs are information created by users, maintaned by users,
and edited, pretty arbitrarily, by users.  In that sense they are
owned by users.

In 4.[23]BSD when cron only supported a crontab for root, then keeping
root's crontab in /etc matched our hier(7), since that was `system'
config info (stuff done by the superuser) rather than `personal' cron
info. (think about it: {daily, monthly, weekly} scripts, usw).

User information like indivdual users' crontabs doesn't belong in
/etc, anymore than individual users maildrops or their personal
.profile/.login/.cshrc belong in /etc.

Okay, so maybe in some setups, they don't work well in /var.  But that
doesn't mean they belong in /etc. That just changes one set of problems
for one group of users, for another set of problems in a different group.
*That* isnt likely to happen. 

If *you* don't like /var/cron, you can apply the symlink kludge which
someone suggested earlier as a palliative for those who object to the
change. If symlinking isn't good enough for you, who are you to say
it's good enough for someone else?