@Gargron Yeah it sucks. The announcement post explaining why they did this was basically:
"We noticed that [X] is a problem. So we're introducing this new system that only makes said problem worse!"
repeated for
"having only 10000 unique IDs per name" (now only 1),
"other scripts were limited" (now only lowercase alphanum),
"some people liked to change their name often" (now your last name#id is stored on your profile, maybe forever), and probably more I can't remember.

If it ain't broke!