I've looked and can't find the evidence, I probably deleted it. Gmail was specifically requesting feedback since it was still early days ... either they emailed me/everyone or there was a link on the homepage (or when you logged in). I specifically remember that I said, you know, this is not the biggest deal in the world but it is *very* annoying. (Also, I gave out a lot of gmail invites to my LJ flist, so I knew I was not the only person finding it weird and annoying. I'm generally not the type to file bug reports.)

This leads me to think that it was gmail and not LJ that fixed the issue. It took about a month (?) but the issue did resolve.