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Maybe a good thing for WI/Curse, but a horrible, horrible day for end-users.
Addons have become prevalent and numerous enough to be difficult to manage individually. When you're running 90+ different addons, individually visiting each and every download page / website becomes an hours-long ordeal.
Remembering which versions of which addons come from which sites, which may or may not be updated at all, may have different versions available on different sites, etc...
Then came WoWAce. A very large number of quality addons, with easily-accessible links on a single page (files.wowace). For folks running a large number of Ace-based addons, this helped a lot. Everything was still manual, but at least all the links were in one quickly-accessible place. Well, that's gone now, eaten by Curse (over bandwidth concerns, IIRC).
Updaters like WAU and later WoWMatrix *fixed* this, from a user's perspective. Something that took hours before, now took only a couple of minutes. It was fast, easy, and (mostly) intuitive.
On the back-end, things weren't so good for authors/compilation sites. Between WM's inefficient update methods eating bandwidth, advertisement woes, etc... these sorts of sites were feeling a bit stiffed by what WM was doing. And that's perfectly reasonable and understandable.
However, instead of both sides working together - sites creating a bandwidth-efficient method for notifying WM of updates, WM using those methods, and perhaps adding a column to their listing to provide links back to the author's sites for donations, etc... - they're at odds with each other, leaving *users* in the lurch.
I'm not assigning blame to either side here. Whether WM was unresponsive or uncooperative, or whether there were other problems with communications - that doesn't matter to users. What matters is that the two sides have failed to come to terms, and are actively hostile to one another, with little to no regard for their target audience (who ironically is the same for both).
Oh, but the sites say "we have our own updaters, use those!" - updaters which are inferior to WM (in numerous ways, particularly on the Mac), buggy, intrusive (*cough* Curse) or even non-existent. Not a viable option.
Who are the authors writing addons for? Users.
Who is WM supposedly serving? Users.
Who is screwed most by this? Users.
IMHO: Epic. Fail.
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