My guess is the want to further segment the markets so they can improve price discrimination, but they don’t want to sell a “lite” or “value” drive in the NAS s

My guess is the want to further segment the markets so they can improve price discrimination, but they don’t want to sell a “lite” or “value” drive in the NAS segment, so they change the base model(s) to be shittier and accept the bad PR. That way they can come out with a more expensive PMR SKU in the NAS series. SSD manufacturers did a lot of the same where features were stripped from consumer drives (PLP, DRAT/DZAT, etc.), segmented into a new market (notice the NAS SSDs?), and sold back to us as more expensive SKU.