] Beginning with Quicken 2005 for Windows, QIF Data Import
] will no longer be available for most accounts.

I heard about this, but here's the page about it.

Summary: Quicken Interchange Format (QIF) has become the de facto
standard for presenting financial and billing records in a non-CSV
(Comma Separated Value) manner. Everyone reads and understands it;
GnuCash, MS Money, etc. It is trivial for a financial site to provide a "feed" of it for a given set of records.

Perhaps too trivial.

So Quicken is now promoting OFX (Open Financial Exchange). They claim to have supported it since Quicken 98, but apparently the uptake hasn't been what they had hoped. No one uses it. Expensive licensing, perhaps?

So Intuit took drastic measures as the dominant player in its field: first, Quicken 2005 and on no longer support QIF except for credit card records (strong lobby). Second, all users of 2002 and before versions (most years are non-essential upgrades) have to upgrade to 2005; all the online services will no longer work otherwise.

The whole point of a package like Quicken, these days, is the online functionality; you give it your online accounts, and it figures everything (stocks, cost basis, checking accounts, credit cards) out.

While I can sympathize with the folks at Intuit if QIF really was a kludge "over 10 years old and was designed for technical support purposes, it was not for transaction download". But this really sounds like a heavy handed attempt at reasserting market dominance.

Intuit: QIF Import Users Resource Center