Although something was caught quickly, I think there is a massive underestimation of the time spent for people to download, uncompress, and analyze not only this most recent data dump, but past data dumps to understand what has changed. There was also waiting for an official answer. Many, many hours of people's time and computational resources were spent on this.
I'd also disagree that this was not meant to be sneaky. If it wasn't, why not announce it before (or concurrently with) the data dumps? Or why wait so long to respond to this question about it? No, I do think the intent was to be sneaky, but some people care a lot and want to make sure the data is good and available.