Disappointing...
In addition to the low cost of ownership (we won't lie), that thing the attracted us most about AC was that despite it being proprietary, there was a large degree of "openness" to it. We understood the nature of the data and its ownership, we could make suggestions re improvements, and perhaps most importantly, the voices within the community could/would be heard by admin. Those factors are exactly why we chose AC over outfits like Practice Fusion (thank goodness). In return, we never complained about the sometimes-spotty tech support, and we chalked up all the hiccups as just the cost of doing business with a smaller, more responsive company.
Now it appears that the community is becoming less of the concern for the admin. Perhaps us end-users will never understand the real reasons for this new encryption procedure: I'm not sure I buy fully into the "security" concerns. But it feels like we just lost a good degree of ownership and control over our own data, and more importantly, the future became much more cloudy, no pun intended...
