It's a legitimate question. Frankly, the idea of a phone's performance drastically changing over the course of one(1) version upgrade should aggrivate someone more than this. How can it be acceptable for a single release to "slow a phone to a crawl"?

This response makes sense. They screwed up communicating the issue of battery life to the masses that apparently don't know batteries wear out. They're fixing it, they're biting into their revenue with a mea culpa price cut, and they're making the OS more communicative of this nuance of phone performance.