I'm a Microsoft Certified Master myself (of SQL Server) so I'll explain a little about what's got everybody up in arms.
When you do enterprise admin work, you often can't share that work publicly. It's not like someone can look at my DBA.StackExchange profile and see the deployments I've done for StackExchange, AllRecipes, Discovery, etc. The MCM was Microsoft's highest technical certification that gauged your sysadmin skills, so that work you've done for high end enterprise systems pays off here. When other high end companies came to call, I could say, "I'm an MCM. There's only a couple hundred of us worldwide, and most of them work for Microsoft as consultants - I'm one of the few independents." Combine that with references, and it's just easier to get doors opened.
Of course, it only makes sense if the certification is actually hard - and hoowee, was it hard. Originally, it involved spending 6 weeks onsite at Microsoft undergoing a series of tests, culminating in a monster 6-hour hands-on lab test. It was the toughest 6 hours of my life, and I've gone through some pretty tough outages. There were no braindumps that could get you past the MCM (unlike the near-worthless MCITP exams.)
Unfortunately, the MCM was too hard to achieve for most folks, and they couldn't get the market adoption they wanted. It's really expensive to write and administer these kinds of high-end tests, and Microsoft was faced with updating the tests faster and faster due to the faster release cycles coming out on the software side. Worse, they wanted the Master certification to cover not just on-premise software, but cloud services as well, so you had to test Master-level skills across both - but the cloud services changed constantly. (Heck, the MCITP-level tests for Windows Azure SQL Database still has the wrong marketing brand name on it even today.)
Just ended up being too expensive for them to manage in the face of limited adoption.
The current MCMs are bummed because it cost us a ton of money and time to get certified, and we never saw significant benefits from the program. The best resource was the mailing list. (I'm not bummed because the cert has paid off the initial investment for me, even though I put out something like $25k total out of pocket.)
People who are currently working on their MCMs are bummed out because they've invested a lot of money and time (in some cases, international flights & hotels) and they won't finish in time.
Solution architect here who spends a lot of time with Microsoft's stack. I've got absolutely no certifications of any kind and refuse to take part in the certification circus. It serves only to generate an ecosystem rather than to solve problems and costs companies a lot of money.
We've thrown our partnership agreement in as it is not valuable for us and the certification management is a pain. We can't get staff with certifications and people don't want them any more anyway and we can't force people to take them.
At the end of the day, it's a dying concept. You can't get bummed out about something which was circling the drain years ago.
Regarding fit for purpose staff, we've had people with wonderful CV's jammed full of experience and certifications galore but when it comes down to it, a blind monkey would be a better asset when you have you have to diverge slightly from the preprogrammed certification skills.
I somehow doubt you would have preferred a blind monkey over an MCM. Your comments are totally fair for the rest of the certifications, though, and that's why people are upset. The rest of the certs are often held by blind monkeys.
Six weeks (of equivalent salary) + US$25K + expenses is a significant expense. You state the investment paid off for you, but I wonder how often that would be the case? Is the ROI there for most candidates?
When you do enterprise admin work, you often can't share that work publicly. It's not like someone can look at my DBA.StackExchange profile and see the deployments I've done for StackExchange, AllRecipes, Discovery, etc. The MCM was Microsoft's highest technical certification that gauged your sysadmin skills, so that work you've done for high end enterprise systems pays off here. When other high end companies came to call, I could say, "I'm an MCM. There's only a couple hundred of us worldwide, and most of them work for Microsoft as consultants - I'm one of the few independents." Combine that with references, and it's just easier to get doors opened.
Of course, it only makes sense if the certification is actually hard - and hoowee, was it hard. Originally, it involved spending 6 weeks onsite at Microsoft undergoing a series of tests, culminating in a monster 6-hour hands-on lab test. It was the toughest 6 hours of my life, and I've gone through some pretty tough outages. There were no braindumps that could get you past the MCM (unlike the near-worthless MCITP exams.)
Unfortunately, the MCM was too hard to achieve for most folks, and they couldn't get the market adoption they wanted. It's really expensive to write and administer these kinds of high-end tests, and Microsoft was faced with updating the tests faster and faster due to the faster release cycles coming out on the software side. Worse, they wanted the Master certification to cover not just on-premise software, but cloud services as well, so you had to test Master-level skills across both - but the cloud services changed constantly. (Heck, the MCITP-level tests for Windows Azure SQL Database still has the wrong marketing brand name on it even today.)
Just ended up being too expensive for them to manage in the face of limited adoption.
The current MCMs are bummed because it cost us a ton of money and time to get certified, and we never saw significant benefits from the program. The best resource was the mailing list. (I'm not bummed because the cert has paid off the initial investment for me, even though I put out something like $25k total out of pocket.)
People who are currently working on their MCMs are bummed out because they've invested a lot of money and time (in some cases, international flights & hotels) and they won't finish in time.