We are going to do something to walk this change back and restore the functionality.
We have not made a final decision on what it will look like exactly, but we’ve read this thread and considered the use cases discussed here and they will be taken into account when designing it.
It shouldn’t take a very long time. 1.8 has been launched barely three days–we are just recovering from launch aftermath. It takes the community a couple of days to identify the high-profile stuff and get us the information we need to address any major issues in a satisfactory way. We were able to plan out a followup release last night, and design work has been happening in parallel. After that, development, QA, app store approval, etc. This is a top priority and we are listening. It will be out as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience.