I'd like to know why they're removing this feature, when I've never seen anyone ask for it to be removed, and in fact many people have been asking for a similar feature to be added to the gardens in personal houses?

It's probably something to do with reducing character data, since that seems to be the problem holding every aspect of the game back at the moment. But rather than taking functionality away from players (remember when we could log out/enter and instance and return inside our houses?), maybe they should be concentrating their efforts on fixing the base problem? As nice as it is to have huge content updates every month or so, I don't think anyone would mind if they took a little time off to improve the basic infrastructure of the game.