The ending of the ability to transfer, or instantly unlock, the same characters which were earned in GW1 was not a deliberate decision- the entire transfer process was causing technical issues each time it was used.
While the exact nature of those issues was never made clear the process did obviously make demands on the server resources available to each game and its likely those issues were related to that fact.
In the final days to the enforced deadline PopCap was very optimistic that the transfer program would remain- they were actually confident enough to state in one of their Live Streams that they were almost positive that the underlying issues would be fixed and the length of the program would be extended but ultimately whatever the technical problems were they couldn't be overcome.
So it's not a situation which involved a company making an arbitrary decision to slight latecomers to the game; it was a deadline created due to problems caused by a really cool feature they made to reward long time players which was available for a full year before finally being closed down.
