Oh yeah, I'd count project.json in dotnet core to be an example of that already. The community was told it would be pulled eventually with no real involvement from the community.
EDIT: Or just robo-downvote me, lol instead of presenting a counterpoint.
It was not like they didn't have a reason. The project.json was completely incompatible with the rest of their build chain, and changing it would be a colossal undertaking, that would mean they had to support two different build systems to remain backwards compatible.
I'm not in favor of the msbuild system at all, it's not good. But it works, it's reasonable once you learn it (like most other build systems), and since they're footing the bill and have to keep the entire system in a coherent state, they decided what they did.
The only reason we saw it, was that they've opened up their development process a lot earlier than they used to do.
Totally agree, I think they realized what they did once they dove into the deep end. I won't criticize them pulling that feature back, it was just the way they went about. I can't be too hard on them, I'm sure they've learned a ton about maintaining source publicly since then.
project.json was pulled due to very strong negative feedback from the community. Not sure how you missed that, but it's actually an example of Microsoft changing course due to significant community involvement.
I'm willing to accept that I'm wrong, but can you provide the discussions around that? I did somehow miss it. The only discussions I saw were hand wringing from people about not being involved enough, and these weren't small threads.
EDIT: Or just robo-downvote me, lol instead of presenting a counterpoint.