The early public drafts of GPLv3 had already rejected the idea of incorporating an Affero provision in a strong sense. Instead, they explicitly classified AGPLv1-like Affero conditions as GPLv3-compatible -- but note that no otherwise GPLv3-compatible licenses with Affero conditions existed at the time, and it wasn't especially likely that they would spring into existence. Note that inclusion of some sort of Affero-like provision was already a publicly controversial issue in the run-up to the release of the first public draft of GPLv3, which you can see in some of the news coverage from the period (late 2005).
There was resistance or objection to the sort of compromise around network services the early drafts took, but this basically took the following forms: (1) some individuals (who I would say were mainly associated with the Debian Project or the FSF staff itself) argued that GPLv3 should have directly adopted an Affero provision, though one without the perceived flaws in the AGPLv1 version, which were sort of carried over into the wording of the draft compatibility provision; and (2) some companies (representing financial services interests who had come to be dependent on Linux for data center operations) raised concerns about the compatibility clause leading to an Affero-specific license proliferation problem. Outside of those two viewpoints there wasn't much interest in the issue, once the public drafts of GPLv3 were released.
The eventual solution, responsive to those two points of criticism, was to get rid of the compatibility solution in favor of a single, separate, FSF-authorized, GPLv3-compatible Affero license, with the Affero provision worded in a way that avoided the perceived flaws of the AGPLv1 approach.
Given all of the other FUD around GPLv3 from Linus et al, it seems like they wouldn't have lost much if they'd kept it in (or maybe they should've gone with the LGPL model, where the main license has the restrictions but they have a separate license which reduces the restrictions). But hey, hindsight is 20-20.