To explain a little further with what happened since yesterday - each of the people @TaintedLogic mentioned had not left a review or deleted any of their reviews since then. Those who had temporarily gotten their figure back had left recent reviews due to some fuzzy logic on my part. There's no singling out of users here, that's the common pattern. Expect things to be a little haywire for the next day or two.
As far as greater transparency - we're pretty transparent about the majority of changes across the site. We are, however, a ridiculously small team. Justifying each and every action or having to explain every bug or fix is just not feasible.
This particular issue is one that should have been dealt with years ago and events over the last year or so have forced our hand on it. We'd prefer not to have to remove content (or for authors to remove their own content) nor take your reviews with them, but there are circumstances in which we absolutely have to do both.