When and where did this take-over happen? for I've never seen it. To my knowledge redact means to edit, or create, a (literary) formulation, and is very commonly used as such. It isn't necessarily something you do to somebody else's work; if you revise your own poem you redact it. So I find it difficult to know what is being gone on about here.
Actual 4b is a recent shift. It's basic meaning is to create in the sense of putting together. If you censor a text you do of course redact it because it's not the same after as it was before. That doesn't make the two terms equivalent.
There is a class element, because it's a latin word, which attaches it in some people's ears to the idealism of the classicist.
PR
On 9 Jul 2009, at 09:29, John Hall wrote: