Do you have some citation for this "fiasco"? They did change the plans but I was unaware of any significant unhappiness. (And existing users can keep their old plans anyway.)
I think they abandoned a lot of their "freemail" style services but grandfathered existing users in some cases and those grandfathered plans now aren't updated for obvious reasons?
I really can't recall a major negative fallout from that and I'm fairly certain I joined right around the time that happened (the docs were still a mess because a lot of it hadn't been updated yet and referred to the now non-existent plans).