Magento Partner shakeout: around 100 partners removed from partner listings

Well, Magento kicked them out (gently :)). Last year at the Innovate conference the Magento Developer certification was introduced to give developers a chance to prove their Magento skills. This also gave Magento partner companies a way to differentiate themselves from other companies with the number of certified developers working for them. In Q1 of 2012, Magento announced that partners were required to have a certain amount of certified developers on their payroll in order to stay in the partner program. The numbers depends on the partner level: if you're a Gold partner you need 4 certified developers, a Silver partner 2 and bronze partners have no certification requirements. I think this is a well needed requirement as I also pointed out in my post 'Magento Partnership Improvements' in Februari 2011. I also think Magento did it's best to gradually introduce this requirement to their partners and they've all been notified about this before the removal. I actually think the number of required developers per partner is still a bit low. I do expect that requirement to be raised further in the coming years. So the result is that around 100 worldwide partners (27%) are now removed from the partner listing on magento.com because of this requirement. This doesn't mean that the removed partners are now not a partner anymore (I think) but 'only' that they're not visible anymore in the listing. But I've heard from several new partners that being listed on magento.com gave them a really nice boost in sales leads so being removed can be a big disadvantage for the removed companies. Also: if a partner claims on their own website that they're a Magento partner but they don't show up on the official list than potential customer might skip calling them altogether. What do you think? An outrageous act by Magento or a logical step in Magento becoming more and more professional?