Alternately, perhaps Google cared more about making some of its internal divisions happy than about making customers happy, and that's what drove their definitions/metrics of "success".

For example, the "Real-name only" policy was never customer-focused at all, but an incestuous favor to the advertising/profiling panopticon.

Similarly, the "forced collapse of all credentials" into G+ (like Youtube identities) probably made some things easier for Google (especially pushing its adoption as an identity-provider) but did a lot of things existing users weren't happy with.

How does real names relate to advertising? G+ doesn't even have ads. Google already has your browsing history to know your shopping interests. G+ had real names because Facebook had real names.

A real name and DOB go a long way to cross-correlating with other information. I work at a market-research company, and we're doing some partnering to correlate with voter records...

Fairly simple - a belief that the users who were complaining did not represent the majority of the market.