That's one translation.

Another could be: "Our users are being innovate and using our services in ways we didn't completely anticipate, therefore we are trying to let our products grow "organically" and will make changes that augment what our users appear to be doing."

But this is kind of 2 sides of the same coin.

This seems more likely as hashtags and mentions both came from how users were using Twitter, they weren't originally in Twitter.

I would be more sympathetic to that explanation if the feature being rolled out was somehow novel or at least adding new functionality. But it's not, it's just removing a small quirk and making the service more like everything else on the internet.

That's just spin. Facebook has picked the right bandwagon so Twitter is jumping on. At the end of the day, it's just a link on a website.

It is exactly that. For example, imagine if Facebook made a public page listing all the times that you have ever clicked "like" on something. Weird, right? Twitter just made that.