> My point is simply that there existed no universe in which a responsible Google would continue supporting it
What about the universe where someone decides that keeping the goodwill of the (yes small, but as we've seen in the past week very vocal) Reader userbase is worth the miniscule cost of keeping it alive in maintenance mode?
It's a supply and demand thing. Very few people grow up wanting to make web apps, but many many people grow up wanting to make games, and when they have that chance, willing to take a pay cut to do it.
This line of argument always jumps right from rods and cones to perceived affordances without ever making the case that there's a significant gain to perceived affordances from mocked up depth. If this is so uncontroversially true, surely someone has done a study you can link.
This habit is an example of what Chris Noessel calls "One Free Interaction"[1]. Another prominent example is the bounce on iOS scroll views. There seems to be something about being able to fidget with a UI that makes it more comfortable to use.
I saw Adam Mayer speak at a meetup and he said they dropped the kit versions because they were a huge customer support burden. A lot of things can go wrong putting one of these together.
Meanwhile, half of Hacker News is implementing DCPU-16 compilers. The low level programmer is still flourishing, there's just a lot more people programming.