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I dont mean to be pedantic (I kinda do) but I think the Obliterate playtest card actually became Apocalypse, which a)rfged permanents, b)cost 6, c)made you discard your hand.
 

Ok, everyone seems to have caught the Obliterate/Apocalypse thing, so I'll let that slide this time, Rosewater!

My only comment on this whole article was this:

"Censorship Bear – ...It was decided along the way that the flavor of a Bear caring about word choice made no sense, so the card became Keeper of the Sacred Word."

Really?  In the set that is meant to be funny, a card called Censorship Bear is changed because "a Bear caring about word choice made no sense?"  That sounds hilarious to me.  Keeper of the Sacred Word never struck me as particularly funny, if he had been named Censorship Bear, I would have giggled to high heavens everytime i got to attack with him.  He's a large carnivorous land mammal that is concered with what people say.  Genius!

What is interesting is the playtest cards, and here's an in-depth analysis of what I think about them.

1.  White sliver - I miss Banding.

2.  Divine Might - Dude, MaRo, you completely overlooked the most important fact about this card!  It turns all creatures into sheep!

3.  Nullify - I'm guessing Activator Preventer is the Split Second point, but the card doesn't actually say "This has Activator Preventer", it just says what Activator Preventer does.  I wonder if playtest cards are like this a lot.  It was a major head-scratcher to me, I was trying to figure out if maybe there was an artifact called Activator Preventer in the set which this card was designed to counteract.

4.  Time Stream - Nobody has ever explained to my satisfaction why they're calling them World Enchantment instead of "Enchantment - World" these days; I can think of no sensible reason for it.  This particular World, though, probably doesn't exactly need to see print; too much potential to be unfun.  At the very least it should be retemplated so that your opponent takes two turns after you play it, instead of you taking another turn; that would be way too broken in the late game, as your opponent would just never get the free turn and so this would just be a Time Warp, except you could keep Boomeranging and replaying it.

5.  Chameleon - no comment.

6.  Blue Lice - heheh, Lice.

7.  Life and Death - no comment.

8.  Genocide - good call on the name change.

9.  Etheric Captain - Very cool name, wish it had stayed.

10.  Obliterate - I'm glad they decided to give red some sweepers.

11.  Demolish - Interesting.  I've never wanted to see Shatter obsoleted (which it was as early as Exodus), but the power disparity between Shatter and Disenchant always bugged me.  The only way I could make sense of it was because of artifact creatures; "destroy target enchantment" was definitely weak enough to be one mana, but Shatter at one mana might have been a little strong in some circumstances.  My "everybody wins" idea was to give red a one-mana noncreatures-only Shatter, but it seems as though that idea's window of time has passed.

12.  Red Color Hoser - See, I hate this.  Designs starting with zero flavor suck.  Even goofy flavor is preferable.  Why didn't somebody call this card "White-Out" or "Redeye Removal" or something?  Actually I'm glad that color hosers have dropped off almost to nothing in recent sets, unless those sets encouraged color-matters play as with Shadowmoor and Alara.  The days of Alpha when Karma could kill black mages all by itself and Tsunami pwned any blue player who made the mistake of tapping out?  Ew.

13.  Chokwalla - no comment.

14.  Limited Options - Interesting that it originally made you discard down to 2 right away when you played it.  Considering that we eventually got Madness 0 spells, it's probably better that didn't happen.

15.  Crop Rotation - This card was obviously originally intended to fetch a full Urzatron; nothing else would justify spending four mana and two lands on this.  What degeneracy.  Little wonder that the name finally saw print in the Urza block.

16.  Letter Bomb -  ugh.  Maaaaaa-rooooo!

17.  Scroll Rack - no comment.

18.  Grindstone - I actually like how it just says "repeat"; it makes me think that you could make a set where such 'encoding' in activated abilities is common place, where some keyword-action like "recompile" makes a one-word substitute for the awkward "repeat this process" and just tells you to go back to a specific part of the activation; there's huge design space in this if you could figure it out right.