It's only a matter of time before 1Password has a real security problem because the business forces at 1Password appear to be much stronger than the engineering forces.
They gave me the choice, and then they took it away so they could make more money, directly at the cost of security.
They want to add telemetry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35691383
It's a march of small concessions and after 5 years of marching you find yourself very far away from where you thought you were. "We only collect things that don't matter to you, trust us."
They are taking money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29993961
That means that that shareholders can make the company choose things that benefit shareholders at the cost of customers. Taking investment is a fundamental change in trust architecture.
I no longer believed that 1password is aligned with me, and alignment is a constant force always acting. Removing local vaults was proof of lack of alignment. Removing local vaults was proof that 1Password will choose money over security. Removing local vaults was proof that that appearing worthy of trust is a lower priority than coercing people into their cloud.
By way of example: I recently moved overseas, and in the process I wiped my desktop and moved to a laptop-only setup. Unfortunately, I managed to back up an outdated Adobe Lightroom catalog, not my current catalog, so I lost about two years' worth of catalog data -- including Lightroom edit histories. Yes, this is obviously a mistake on my part, but I recognise that I make these mistakes, and I'm willing to trade some loss of privacy and security for a significant decrease in a different risk profile.
Removing a local option is shitty, but there's nothing wrong with providing cloud-based storage.
The problem isn't their offering of their custom cloud storage solution, but them forcing it upon people who were happy with the current state.