Spell Versatility, as presented, really came off to me as just lazy design that homogenized classes quite a bit. I mean, a sidebar explaining to new DM's that if players of non-prepared spell casting classes were really disappointed with their spell choice between levels, just let them swap out a spell choice, would have sufficed. It was like saying, "Well, we can't make this work, so we'll just make everybody like the wizard!" Now, one can argue that this is kind of what 5e did with the Sorcerer and spontaneous casting, but at least that was an edition change that presumably gave each class its own identity.
However, I'm not sure if it was design aesthetics or balance polishing that caused the removal or survey results reflecting poorly on the feature that did it in. I suspect the later.