These are my exact sentiments. While I can sympathise with those who run their project websites off of Github and used the downloads feature having a compiled downloadable file alongside the source to me feels out of scope for what Github is. To me this change is exactly that: Github focusing on their core strength: source control hosting.
As far as I can see "compiled downloadable files" are not really what most people use downloads for.
More often, it's used for source distributions which just want to add a few tweaks to make things easier for downloaders (pre-generate a configure file, etc).
