"This part is a real designer's wet dream, we need to lose it."

Reminds me a bit of a less weighty story: back in the late '70s and early '80s there was a company that made really attractive blue bypass capacitors (if you've seen a CADR Lisp Machine memory board you know what I'm talking about).

There wasn't anything particularly special about them other than their nice look, and at some point I read about a production stoppage that caused by them (I guess a lot of designs used them). At some point the procurement people asked the EEs "why these?" and the problem was quickly solved.