The core benefit of Dropbox is being "a folder that syncs". They've pretty much nailed it at the very start, and all the recent changes seem to be only step backwards. Lack of ability to link directly to files (instead of their heavy and useless web UI with "download" button) is something that makes their product worse, from user's POV.
Smart sync was a giant leap forward. This one actually makes the sync usable on business accounts as well (fairly small laptop SSD and 15 people storing stuff was a difficult combination).
which can be hotlinked. What this means in a specific sense, I haven't yet learned. I'm particularly interested to know the behavior of any of these links if the file is moved/renamed. I have not tested it, but my intuition is the dropbox.com link would survive a move and the dropboxusercontent.com link would not.
I know it's intentional. I'm just saying it results in something that is definitely not direct and noticeably less useful. That it can be made to trigger a download is not particularly useful.
I agree that it's not direct and less useful. The commenter I originally responded to, however, appeared to be concerned with the ability to link to files in a way that doesn't bring up the Dropbox UI, which the query parameter does at least accomplish to some degree.
