I suspect reports of the end are exaggerated, Staples $200 loads were still working at checkout as of July 29th.
Probably 30% of the time it takes more than one swipe to get a clean read on meta these days, which is a bit of a pain. My theory, (completely unfounded) is there is some sort of database look-up of the BIN going on and sometimes it times out giving the errors. This only started when they brought in the 99 limit at MC