But now it's kinda obvious they only did this as ammo in preparation for today's announcement. I sincerely do hope they continue to add new features, there is a huge stack of requests and ideas still waiting in their support forums.
No, they did it because they lost entire years following ill-advised growth fantasies into nonexisting markets where every yoga session, every treadmill workout would somehow be a "Strava moment" and that would magically pay their bills. They completely neglected their incredibly successful (within scope) but not quite profitable core business. A few months ago they switched to salvage mode, going through those years of accumulated backlog at dangerous speed. And now this, it's just a sign of desperation. It certainly shares the cause with the changes before but I wouldn't call one the buildup for the other.
Hands down the best summary of what seems to be going on I've seen.
I vaguely remember new features some 5+ years ago, or promises of fixing issues (that are still there), but that had stopped and all we got was a social-network-like feed. One would think with the data they have Metro would be able to profit from free users, but I guess not?