Feedback about MS-102 retirement

I wanted to leave the following feedback, as someone who works in Microsoft 365

I am very disappointed with the way Microsoft has chosen to go forward with their certification roadmap. 

As someone who works in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem daily, I've lost the opportunity to pursue PL-600, MS-203, MS-300/301, and now upcoming MS-102, these are just a handful of certifications that would absolutely have been meaningful and exciting for me to obtain

I have no way to validate any of my skills in a lot of areas in Microsoft 365.

I want to step back and discuss the retirement of MS-102 in light of an associate level AI certification.

The communication about the retirement of MS-102 has been extremely poor. I'm writing this Mid-July, and the certification page still has a retirement date set to: None.

Essentially, that leads me to believe a lot of people are being misled because they aren't even aware of the tech community blogpost from last month indicating the impending retirement of this exam

Here's the other problem:

People are now forced to sit down and take retiring exams because the replacements are an extremely poor substitute. It's completely unfair. 

The logical decision could have been integrating more AI into these existing exams instead of retiring them and replacing them with exams that don't even correlate. Or maybe putting them as prerequisites. I looked at the curriculum for PL-400 vs AB-100 and it's not at all architecting solutions in power platform

In summary: Abandoning services like Exchange Online, Teams, Power Platform, and SharePoint Online as a start in favor of agentic AI is an extremely poor decision

I highly doubt all of this will get reversed. But we should have Exchange Online certs, sharepoint online certs, teams certs, power platform certs, more certs of what we as Microsoft 365 Engineers and Admins use every single day, because the industry still demands all of this.

This company needs to stop acting like the only important thing is Copilot and AI, and listen to what your customers are indicating. There's a lot that can be done better here. Maybe gather live feedback and engage with us instead of just putting on blindfolds in this manner

Thanks