I think right now we are arguing over history, which is dumb on my part. I assumed that you have the same knowledge and motivation as me.

To recap, the lower level certs were seen as a profit center by Microsoft, so there wasn't any effort put make any practical, non-game-able certs. This is probably why they dumped the higher level cert, money.

Ideally certs shouldn't be a pure profit center, they should came out of the Support and maybe the PR budget. Training material could and exams fees could recap some costs, but there's no way they could cover all of it and have the any faith in the exams and still be affordable.

The lower level certs had some use to many of us, if they would used to assist people in learning the material outside of the job they might not encounter. The problem is that they are multiple choice questions pools that can and will be "captured" due to their perceived value. And many thought they were more marketing than technical in some questions. So many of the people have "gamed" the lower cert system that some folks in the PASS community have said the 8 out of 10 people they interview with the lower certs couldn't pass three simple questions about basic SQL Server practices.

The master certs apparently were true measure of knowledge and ability. Considering that Microsoft sent many of it's own top folks to the courses, there was definite value in the system.

So with the loss of the only Microsoft certs that truly had value, there's a lot of questions being raised about the process and motivations of Microsoft Learning and Microsoft overall.