You can define "ponder" in multiple ways, but really this is why thinking models exist - they turn over the prompt multiple times and iterate on responses to get to a better end result.
What's the purpose of a primary election? It's to select a party's candidate for a general election. It's not very obvious that this should even be a democratic process, but if it is, why shouldn't party members be the ones selecting their own candidates?
This is a bad idea. But in the same spirit, a bad but less bad idea: require the user to actively enable the deprecated feature via config or something, but have a known schedule to eventually expire it (with a hard error, not randomly incorrect data) and force the user to re-enable it. Causes some pain but not random, hard to track down bug. More like dealing with expiring certs - eventually, the user will want a permanent fix.
This is how it was with cable, and it was actually better for the content providers. They made shows and got fat checks from the cable companies every year.
Then they all copied Netflix, because the stockmarket was rewarding it, and had to start dealing with billing, customer retention, technology platforms, advertising platforms. And they all lost a ton of money a doing it.
Why is it a poor proxy? Someone who really understands the concepts and has the aptitude for it will get answers more quickly than someone who is shakier on it. The person who groks it less may be able to get to the answer, but needs to spend more time working through the problem. They're less good at calculus and should get a lower grade! Maybe they shouldn't fail Calc 101, but may deserve a B or (the horror) a C. Maybe that person will never get an A is calculus and that should be ok.
Joel Spolsky explained this well about what makes a good programmer[1]. "If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don’t even have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts."
If you think they nickel and dime customers, you should see what they do to TV and streaming device makers. They can make basically any demand they want because you can't ship with Netflix.