From a comment further down, it sounds like it's due to considering it now redundant, and not wanting to support two ways of sharing files. The original way to share Dropbox files over the web was to drop them in your Public folder, but now you can right-click on any file, in any folder, and generate a shareable link to it. So they're going with that as the new sharing mechanism, and phasing out the "drop it in your public folder" approach.
Yes, however, the new way seems counter intuitive. It would be difficult to keep track of what is publicly shared, at least in an organized manner.
You could organize all the files you want to share into a single folder. Maybe name it something like Share/ or Public/
If only Dropbox had a folder, perhaps already called Public, that you could organize your shared crap into...
Right Click Any Folder, Dropbox -> Get a Link
But you would still have to generate links for each individual file in there right?
I right clicked a random folder and used "Get a Link" and I was able to browse to it without being logged into Firefox.
What more do you want?
ok. Didn't realize you could generate a link for a folder. That makes it far better.