Interesting! I wonder why ITA never offered a search engine themselves, if they had all the data aggregated. And boy do I love dealing with invalid CSVs... (especially ones that contain commas within the fields by accident)
I want it noted that this thing is really neat — you can provide parameters like min layover of 2 hrs, or 2 weeks, and even search only within a particular airline alliance
There are some feature in matrix that flights didn't pick up. The original matrix site was even more powerful and exposed some operator-ishness, depending on what kind of account you were granted.
I suspect that branding is powerful, so it's better to keep an existing flight search running than to axe it in favor of something else and loose all the existing customers. Google bought ITA and kept matrix.itasoftware.com running with (presumably) the same branding; Booking Holdings bought Kayak and kept kayak.com running with the same branding.