I find it actually funny that people actually seem to belive Blizzard needs someones permission to remove stuff from their game, if they wanted they could remove all added npcs today and it would be in their rights to do it.
Now im sure there is more behind it then we know and we will probably never get to know the reason.
As with the Method thread, we left this thread open as long as possible to meet the need of the community to discuss this topic, but the time to close it down has come.