I know it looks like this is a recent thing in response to the complaints that have been cropping up recently, but it was the plan from around July '19.
If you were around when we originally launched Survival 2.0 back in November, you’ll have seen that /fly was disabled in the extra worlds for the first week of the new map. All of the reset plans, meetings, notes, documents, etc (even the original Guide to Survival 2.0) had it written that fly was to be disabled for the first week after each extra worlds reset, and enabled for the second. Unfortunately we ran into a serious flaw with this plan (only Bad or a developer could turn the fly on and off, and they weren’t reliably free) so we had to abandon it until we could have it made much more feasible to manage. And finally, after so long, this is now possible!
This is not meant to be a nerf of the fly perk. We haven’t touched the ability or the rank itself, all we have done is taken the necessary step to reduce the monopoly of certain valuable items that doubleplus players currently have. Even then, ranked players will still be able to fly out and loot the places everyone wasn’t able to get to in the first week, and still have the second week to fight the wither.
Our aim, as always, is to continue to make the server as enjoyable as possible for as many people as possible. There are lots of different opinions, styles of play, viewpoints and budgets that we have to take into consideration as we go, and not every decision is going to be immediately popular. Every decision, however, is made with a ridiculous amount of careful thought and with the long-term health and sustainability of the server in mind.