[koala_man]

>How else do you explain things like their habit of overhauling the graphics while removing functionality on many of their popular offerings?

I can't speak to any specific instances, but generally when this happens it's because the front-end needed replacing, and not because they had to give up on supporting the functionality on the backend.

For example, the front-end may have been mobile or offline hostile, while the new one works great with both but only reimplemented 80% of the massive feature set that the old UI accumulated.

It sucks if you primarily used the site on desktop and heavily leveraged the missing 20%, but I can see the value in such a trade-off.