Why did Bare Bones drop BBEdit Lite? As John Gruber notes, eleven-year-old BBEdit 2.1 runs fine on OS X, so there's no reason to think BBEdit Lite 6.1 won't be a usable editor for years to come without needing substantial updates. Bare Bones has made it clear that TextWrangler is a completely different beast, so why stop distributing the free version?
I can think of one reason that eliminating BBEdit Lite is beneficial to Bare Bones: It effectively raises the price of BBEdit. For years, Bare Bones has offered the full version of BBEdit at a substantial discount ($60, as of v7.0) to people who own, among other products, BBEdit Lite. As Lite was free, this more or less amounted to an idiot tax levied against anyone who didn't pay attention.
To put this in perspective, factoring in the 'cross-upgrade' meant BBEdit 6.5 could be purchased for $79. In November, when they released 7.0, Bare Bones raised the cross-upgrade price to $119, and now that they've eliminated BBEdit Lite, a new user needs to cough up $179. That's an increase of over 225% in a period of three months.
Good luck, guys.