So this is a clear issue of misaligned priorities between content seekers and content providers I guess. I'm very very glad they went with the optimum for content seekers in this case.
It's less that the priorities are misaligned, and more that Google wasted the time of the content providers by recommending that they do something that is no longer going to be used.
Google is constantly changing the way results show up and ranking and content creators are always shuffling to get ahead, I don't see how this is any different from something like say, Panda, or any other periodic change to how Google presents information.
