It would be really nice to have an official response to this.
Don't get me wrong, st0rm is awesome. He's a keeper. But he can't always give us the official reasoning behind changes, tell us if they were intentional, or give us an estimation as to when bugs will be fixed.
I realize that with the holidays, things are busy, but a quick, "I'm alive, that's noted, and I'll get back to you on that. With the holidays we're a little short-staffed and I don't have the time to type out a full reply on our reasons, but it was/was not intentional." would have been appreciated.
Okay. I'll now go back to taking it out on some imps instead of the developers.

[Note: I missed the fact that Uiqua did log in and respond to the Winter Update thread, so if you read the first version of this post, I want to say I was wrong. Mea culpa for missing the response and being unreasonably grouchy.]