I work at a major investment bank. Virtually everyone that travels on the floor made good use of the benefit for both work and personal travel (as mentioned in above posts, it's basically a de facto waiver on change fees and a 'free option' to lock into a lower fare class, with the flexibility to not issue the ticket until very close to departure time).

I can understand how this was too good to be true. But I still think there could have been some middle ground instead of what we have today.

And yes the benefit was killed mainly out of revenue protection for guess where but...CTS. (Ironically, I don't think the CTS route performed as well as they wanted it to be this year. Hahaha)