If you didn't use the feature, you might have missed it, but we talked about its removal publicly for over a year. We also made many incremental changes over that year in order to phase it out so that it wasn't a sudden removal. We did all of that, despite the fact that it was used by an incredibly tiny fraction of our total install base. The people who used encrypted SMS are very vocal, but the users we're really targeting never even knew it existed.
I think projects like this one are great. I have no idea if the people behind it know what they're doing or can write secure software, but we've always wanted some place where the people who want to import their GPG key, manually select their underlying block cipher, or support WoT style key signatures can go. Projects like these might be a better fit for those users.