No, I don't. They did with Pocket what they do with every nontrivial feature. Implemented it, and sherriffed it through the release trains. I don't think it was immediately plopped on a Firefox release, I recall seeing it on Developer/Aurora much earlier, which means it went through the release trains like everything else. The OP said, quote, "so why was Pocket pushed _so hard_ and couldn't wait a couple of Fx versions". How was it "pushed" "hard" if they did the _same thing_ they do for other features?
Yes, they made the decision to implement this feature. That doesn't count as pushing. I already illustrated why that decision made sense at the time.
Perhaps there was some backlash as it was on Aurora/Beta, I don't recall the exact timelines. IMO it's still okay to let the feature -- one which you still think makes sense and would benefit the userbase -- continue to ride the trains and hit a release while you try to understand the criticism and come up with a solution. It may be a better solution to disable it until a decision is made, but that depends on the perceived severity of the problem. Again, I don't see any hard pushing here, just a somewhat justifiable choice. I too would have preferred if they removed the feature when there was backlash, but I don't see anything wrong with the other solution. If you immediately backtracked every time there was criticism nothing would get done.
> but the criticism came from the fact that this 3rd party extension came preinstalled and was "pushed" to users.
Sure. But you gave the example of Instapaper (which you seem to be more okay with Firefox integrating with); I'm suggesting it was probably less popular than Pocket in FF or at least comparable popularity. I'm not disagreeing that integrating with a closed third party service is not good. I'm just pointing out a flaw in your Instapaper comment.