zoomSpeed gone from ChaseCamera?

The latest builds of jME3 have removed the zoomSpeed field from ChaseCamera. We utilize custom subclasses of ChaseCamera heavily in some of our development, and the ability to tune the zoomSpeed is pretty critical to our application.

Is there a new API facility to affect the same sort of functionality? Or was this a very deliberate decision with no alternative approach?

Actually it was removed because the variable was not used anymore in the class.
You should use zoomSensitivity instead.
see this post http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/forum/topic/chasecamera-bug/