I feel the view counter went away because it is a really big pain in the ass to do as a decentralized system. The only way to properly do it is each person if they have seen it or not. So, to view a count, you query all the people and count how many saw it.

The way I think they did it was to count how many people clicked on the link, and stored that in the posts information. (like where they store the vote count). But this gets frustrating, as you have more than one source for viewing. Steemit and Steemd being just 2 examples.

The way it appears they implemented it, also appeared buggy in other ways. As in, causing more net traffic.

I feel it was just poorly implemented, and now it is back to the drawing boards. (and yes, if you go to steemd you can see all the bot groups vote in groups at specific times.)