The breaking of the feature was seemingly a response to try and break maps to begin with - the data used in the footprints is what the mapping applications used (along with millions of accounts giving off false coordinates) to triangulate 'mon.

The root motivation of the bug was the stressing of the servers by "headless" accounts that existed solely to make mapping software possible. It's unfortunate that they chose to try and combat that activity rather than just understand it's what people wanted and make it less taxing on their server (make a mapping endpoint on an alternate server).