It's not the first pointless downgrade of the LG remote: they've already removed the pause button.
Now pausing and unpausing is done with the general-purpose click-wheel, is up to each app to implement, and is dependent on the UI state.
If a wrong element is focused (which is not hard to do, because the button is a scroll wheel surrounded by directional buttons), you may end up toggling subtitles or some other option when trying to pause or unpause.
It used to be a hardware button that always worked, was trivial to find by feel, easy to activate, and worked instantly.
Now it's "wait, I need to pause! Oops, I moved the scroll wheel button by a notch when pressing it, so it's a mouse cursor now! I fast-forwarded to the second half of the movie and the audio is in French."
Now pausing and unpausing is done with the general-purpose click-wheel, is up to each app to implement, and is dependent on the UI state.
If a wrong element is focused (which is not hard to do, because the button is a scroll wheel surrounded by directional buttons), you may end up toggling subtitles or some other option when trying to pause or unpause.
It used to be a hardware button that always worked, was trivial to find by feel, easy to activate, and worked instantly.
Now it's "wait, I need to pause! Oops, I moved the scroll wheel button by a notch when pressing it, so it's a mouse cursor now! I fast-forwarded to the second half of the movie and the audio is in French."