I think actually it was more or less accidentally not hyphenating previously (or in xetex) as hyphenchar is 45 hyphenation isn't suppressed in verb but the first word (only) of each verb is not considered as a word for hyphenation due to some of the verb setup latex does, that is certainly not a documented feature of latex:-)
the new \hyphenationbounds=1 possibility of luatex 1.x would give the old behaviour here but I think setting the font's hyphenchar to -1 (or better perhaps latex should make \verb set the language to none)
