I'm inclined to agree with you and probably will end up putting it back and finding other ways to slow down quotes usages. One of the steps I took was to at least require a person to be logged in before using quotes. That might be enough to cut back usage quite a bit and also prevent people from using scripts to "harvest" quotes here like I used to do to Yahoo long ago.
Or maybe I could have a daily quotes limit (for non-premiums) based on some small multiple of the number of posts they've written today. Anything that promotes posting activity is a good thing.