I'm glad they're gone. My guess is that people complained about seeing the same shit for every match. I don't really miss them.
Naughty Dog, fix Plunder. It's so broken the way it is right now. We take the treasure to our base, the other team spawns next to our treasure chest. Other team takes the treasure to their base, we sometimes spawn across the fucking map. Wtf is this? Not to mention the constant buddy spawn campers. Honestly, disable buddy spawning. It won't be missed in a playlist like Plunder. It ruins the whole flow of it. Then there's the questionable idol spawn points that always favors one team over the other. Or you try grabbing the idol, but it won't grab it for some reason until like 1 or 2 minutes. Or you get equipped with your damn pistol every time you drop the idol. Such a stupid design choice. It's these small details that are holding this game mode back. Some of these issues like spawning across the map were present in Uncharted 2's Plunder, but it hasn't been entirely fixed for UC3. Please do something about it.
Edit: Forgot to mention...gotta love it when you sometimes grab the idol, and it disappears on you and spawns in another location even when the appropriate time period hasn't even been reached for the idol to respawn.