Hi Mike, I'll try to answer your questions and appreciate that you went through that long thread to look up the history.
3D Warehouse is operated by Trimble, and is planned to continue towards the future. 3D Warehouse serves much more than just Geo-located models and many companies have large collections like appliances for house designers to use in their designs.
Trimble also owns SketchUp (bought it from Google almost two years ago) and I believe that KMZ support is ongoing. KMZ itself is more than just 3D model file format, and is embedded in many technologies, so I don't see it being abandoned for some time.
The horse and car analogy can only go so far so let's talk about 3D buildings generation. The processes involved in judging, and publishing the user created models are no longer being supported internally, as we are focusing on the newer technology of stereophotogrammetry and the processes to support that. It's an entirely different process and we can't do both, unfortunately. The process for publishing the user generated 3D is so complicated that it took us from August, to February to successfully push the last, albeit huge, data push. It just isn't feasible to continue, and that's why we had made the decision to shut it down.
I understand that this is frustrating, especially because it's out of your control, but it is the only way we can drive the technology forward, and there's really never a good time to stop supporting something that people want to continue using.
Best,
- Craig