> As a concisionist, this change stinks.

There's two side to it: it makes creating unique pointers slightly harder, but at the same time it makes (unnecessary) overuse of unique pointers slightly harder/less likely, and that looks to be a concern of the core team.

> Designing a language to be prolix just makes code more laborious to understand.

Does it make the code more laborious to understand though? The concept becomes easier to search for and it's easier to talk about it (both because box/boxing is a term of art, and because "box" is a single syllable).