It's too bad, but the writing has been on the walls for a long time. A close friend of mine had build a great little iOS app a while back designed to let you know when items on your queue were going to be pulled from Netflix instant. After several months of the app being live in the app store, Netflix decided to limit the results to showing either greater than 2 weeks or less than 2 weeks. Eventually, that information was removed from the API altogether, and my friend pulled his app from the store.
From that single anecdotal data point, I had the Netflix API has always been a mess anyway, and poorly documented.
What was the app's name? I built the same thing but for Android app about 4 years ago: FixMyQ. It's still a painful use case that I wish they would officially implement, or at least be more transparent about. I always suspected that they didn't/don't want users to focus on movies expiring at all (makes sense). However, rather than educating users as to why this happens, they pulled the info like you mentioned. Such a shame!
From that single anecdotal data point, I had the Netflix API has always been a mess anyway, and poorly documented.