Here's hoping they get it right, because the way it stands now, building a good aggregator is very tricky. The "this is why we can't have nice things" attitude is really putting a damper on valuable developments, and it's very close to stifling competition. Why is it anyone's problem that their algo is not smart enough to see potential value in new kinds of services? Even human vs. software curation should be irrelevant here.
"Google is really killing the "release early and release often" approach, if people will now have to do a ton of SEO learning and tweaking to avoid having your MVP permanently banned at launch day."
Judging by the downvotes this is not a legitimate concern? Why?
Actually, from an SEO perspective, the #1 principle Google follows is preventing "release often" from being effective for SEO.
Talk to anyone who makes money at PPC and they will tell you one thing. You make a campaign, measure the results, change it a little, measure the results, and make incremental improvements to make a profitable campaign.
If you could do that with SEO, SEO would be a lot easier. Google, therefore, has a number of mechanisms (some patented) that cause all hell to break loose if you make the kind of changes to your site that you'd use to incrementally improve it's SEO.
It's one of the reason we are stuck with crappy sites like answers.com, w3schools, and wrongdiagnosis, because once a site like that is successful, the operators are loathe to make any changes lest their rankings drop.
