I raised this and the lack of communication regarding the alerts outage in a comment to Harris Sockel on a Medium Blog piece. He acknowledged the concerns and said he would share them with colleagues. So they can't say they haven't been told how the community feels about this.

I pointed out that it was very much not in their interests to piss off paying users, and that much could be remedied simply by better-phrased and more timely communication.

We shall see...