The poster you quoted wanted both open-jaw and stopover, and stopovers are only available, supposedly, until Dec 31st.

Starting Jan 1st, nothing indicates you can't include an open jaw into one PNR, all DL is saying is about its pricing:

"For Award Travel ticketed on or after January 1, 2015, all open jaw itineraries will be priced based on One-way Award Travel pricing rules."

If the change doesn't mean two PNRs for OJ award tickets, then this wouldn't seem to be any different from what is done now.

People are speculating that a return leg from Europe may incur fuel surcharges.

This seems very likely. "One way pricing" seems to hint at fuel surcharges being enforced, so I would expect you will have to pay those if you decide on an open-jaw.

In booking an award ticket that included an open-jaw and stopover for next July (which took 3 phone calls and almost 2 hours of talking with Delta), the agents kept pricing my trip at many more miles than should be required.

I found low level availability on the inbound and low level business availability on the outbound. However, the agent repeatedly tried to charge me 135,000 Skymiles. I argued the point that there was low level availability and eventually they were able to get the price to match the correct price of 92,500 miles.

It was a very frustrating process, especially since I knew I was correct and Delta was trying to make me pay more miles than even a round trip in low level business elite would cost.

I have been waffling on switching airlines from Delta to American. This was one of the differentiators for Delta. Our families' last three vacations have taken advantage of either open jaws, layovers, or both.
Since it no longer is, the benefits from American now outweighs the benefits of Delta. With only 250k points left in my Skymiles account and PM set for next year, no real reason to continue accruing miles in my account.
And since the benefits of status are important to me, I will fly predominately American next year and future years.

That was our vacation last year. Quite the nice feature. Thanks for ruining the last decent benefit of your program.

Although still a devaluation, I can see the rationale in instances where someone wants to hang out in another city for a few days. But in some cases, the "stop-over" is literally an overnight.

Last year I was on a cruise and because of the arrival time and so forth it was not possible to get from CPH to the US and then connect to MCO. So we flew CPH-CDG-BOS, overnighted in BOS, and then flew BOS-MCO the next morning.

They ought to at least include a 24 hour exception to allow for this type of scenario.

Stopover for international travel is by definition 24 hours or more. There is nothing that indicates you won't be able to spend 23 hrs 59 min in a city after Jan 1st, other than maybe taking away multi-city searches.

Doesn't look like non-DL awards will be at the normal award pricing ("level 1") anymore. At least not necessarily always.

Could this be a return to how it was with NW, that some awards priced out more (at a higher unpublished mileage level) with KE than with NW, for example (which thankfully went away with DL/006)?

Along with removing stopovers earlier this year AA hasn't also simultaneously devalued the value of its miles. With DL, what used to be 70K miles RT in BE (Hawaii to S Asia) less than a year ago is now 70K miles RT in Y. That's right: last year's BE pricing is current economy pricing for awards. That is, essentially, a two fold devaluation of the miles, plus with removal of stopover it's a devaluation of more than 70% (i.e. reducing value by 70% to only 30% of what it was a year ago of a mile in redemptions).

Actually it's Y 22.5K -> 30K and J 35K -> 50K, if compared to what was in place less than a year ago.

And Hawaii to S Asia: Y 22.5K -> 35K, where Y becomes what J used to be 35K OW for 70K RT

This sucks! Although I've thought about it often, I've never threatened to fire Delta. This is the straw that will cause me to evaluate my airline options.

I've taken advantage of free stopovers every year for the last 16 years.

Seriously? You really thought that?

Lay off whatever it is you're drinking or smoking. :p

I read it as fuel surcharges will be enforced.
If you look at the non-NA origin charts, there is still only one level.

For those of you who dont know how much of a big deal fuel surcharges are - take a wonder to the AC or BA forums - a one way surcharge Europe-NA can easily run you $500 on top of regular taxes.

I'm speculating that it won't if one can manage this to be a single PNR.