Why did you remove oil paint in CC 2014?!

Question

I use this filter extensively in my workflow, now it is gone from the latest update to CC! This is terrible, all these wonderful new features and you remove one I use on a daily basis!
I will keep the previous PS version for the time being.
Anyone have any workarounds for this going forward?

Answer 1

John, I was thinking more along the lines of a few versions before, not 2 months before.  In the corporate world of software engineering, you can be sure it was gone WAY before that announcement.  The stuff we consumers see released today has been finished for a long time.
With all due respect to Adobe, sometimes even when the work gets difficult it's important to do it anyway - even if it means it will cost more or delay a release. 
Some pointy haired boss in the past approved projects to add the Pixel Bender subsystem and the Oil Paint filter.  It was justifiable enough then to implement it where it hadn't existed before.  THAT was a long-term decision.  The product is not a fun little game for Adobe's research engineers; it's something USERS rely on; base their careers on, actually.   Okay, that may be extreme with regard to Oil Paint, but there's no denying people rely on / base careers on Photoshop as a whole.  What parts of it CAN safely be removed?
It's a professional product, fully expected to do EVERYTHING its predecessor did - and then some.  That should be clear given all the folks scratching their heads over why CC (2014) has been released as a separate executable.
As I have mentioned in prior discussions on this subject, people DID actually rely on Oil Paint, and not primarily for simulating fake oil paintings, which it wasn't really that good at.  There is real innovation in the way it senses edges and creates strokes that is pretty much impossible to achieve any other way.  I used it to smooth jaggies.  People used it even though the filter left a nasty 256->240 white point offset that had to be corrected afterward.
A problem at another level - a perceptual level - is that in a couple of different ways Oil Paint added innovative "Gee Whiz" new functionality in a way that was highly interactive (GPU programming).  People noticed that.  You don't just take back out the "Gee Whiz" and call it a day, if for no other reason than it sends a message to the customers that Adobe is no longer capable of delivering "Gee Whiz".
And that takes us to the now brutally bare bottom line:  Since no justification beyond "we outdated the tech" has been offered, Adobe really IS admitting to being incapable of maintaining that particular bit of Gee Whiz,  As flush with cash as they are with the success of the cloud model, it's clear they have chosen not to keep themselves capable of delivering it.  That's fundamentally disturbing.
-Noel