I believe the 2 personal card deal would still be alive if the credit card pimps had not flogged it like a rented mule for the past several years, to mix metaphors. They made their money for a while and we permanently lost our one remaining reasonable path to CP.
I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure how familiar you are with other cards form Chase and other banks, but this has been a trend in the past couple years, at both Citi and Chase, of making restrictions that use to apply to just one card apply to all cards in the same progrram. You used to only be able to get one bonus per exact AA card at Citi every 24 months, now since a couple years ago you can only get one per whole family of AA cards at Citi every 24 months. You used to be able to get multiple Chase Sapphire cards and the bonus on each, and now there's a one-Sapphire-card-per-user limit (even though there are two different kinds of Sapphire cards).
So IMHO this would have happened no matter what, because it's the trend within credit card companies.