Well then good for you, and you should be able to merge all your accounts with Google into one; but why should this be almost compulsory?
What's more, if there's so much value into this, why does Google have to force its users to do it?
Quite often here on Hacker News we sit around and talk about how removing features or options from an App is often the best thing to do for usability. I think this is true. At the same time every time this comes up with regards to Google or some other large company the response flips around completely.
Ultimately I think the readership here is just the 10% of users that want the option, exactly the group we often say that should be ignored for the overall good of the product.
It's Google becoming more and more mainstream. It's Lowest Common Denominator Google.
Every revision, something else is gone. Another menu is missing, another option.
After scouring enough Google Support forums, tinkering in enough settings and trying enough workarounds, it's the only solution I can come to.
Google isn't the hacker search engine we fell in love with over a decade ago.
It's an advertising company looking to monetize on a user's lack of privacy to help connect them with advertisers. Adwords is 99% of their business. We can't just ignore that forever.
The lowest common denominator of user is the the type of user is probably most susceptible not controlling their privacy well enough and for Google being able to target them widely. How much does Google really care about us ad-block toting hacker types anyway?
Not happy with the options in there service, use something diffrent.