My point is that someone made the decision for it to do that and that the software works just fine as is. It's not a bug, it's just a weird quirk. The fact that they made the enhancement you requested doesn't make the old behavior buggy. Your post title said "it's not a bug, it's a feature!", but the behavior you reported is not accurately classified as a bug.
A vector space is a collection of vectors in which you can scale vectors and add vectors together such that the scaling and addition operations satisfy some nice relationships. The 2D and 3D vectors that we are used to are common examples. A less common example is polynomials. It's hard to think of a polynomial as having a direction and a magnitude, but it's easy to think of polynomials as elements of the vector space of polynomials.