Sort by View Count removed - Why I'm using YouTube less

I thought I'd share a frustration that I have with YouTube. Once apon a time, YouTube allowed you to sort videos by relevance, date and view count. For some reason, that I can't explain, in a recent site tweak they removed the ability to sort by viewcount and now you can only sort by relevance and date - which is annoying. This is one of the ways I'd tell which videos are the most popular and therefore worth watching. I guess they are trying to steer people towards viewing channels, categories and regions, which means that they can use this to upsell to premium channels in future. In any case, because of this feature, I don't find YouTube as useful anymore and find that I am using it less. But if anyone can explain the rationale behind this minor change it would be much appreciated.