Because not everyone has the same use cases. A positive change for most users can be a negative for a few, and you don't ever want to be perceived as saying "We're super excited to be screwing you, 'cause we don't care about your needs!"

Yeah, I'm most curious about who is negatively affected by this.

I am. My sites traffic went way up after adding authorship to my posts.

Power users probably. They're disproportionately likely either to use it themselves, or to recognize authors at a glance.

I dunno! I don't use it either way. There's a lot of people in the post comments with opinions, though.

Because they spent time working on it.

Right, and they also convinced web publishers to spend time working on it.

Agreed. Authorship was supposed to be a revolution in search marketing. Author Rank was the new Page Rank. It was the Next Big Thing (TM). And now it's dead.

So this is a clear issue of misaligned priorities between content seekers and content providers I guess. I'm very very glad they went with the optimum for content seekers in this case.

It's less that the priorities are misaligned, and more that Google wasted the time of the content providers by recommending that they do something that is no longer going to be used.

Google is constantly changing the way results show up and ranking and content creators are always shuffling to get ahead, I don't see how this is any different from something like say, Panda, or any other periodic change to how Google presents information.

I get your point though.