Apple released a statement on iMore today after a resurgence in the discussion over the Pencil’s lost functionality:

Apple Pencil has been a huge hit with iPad Pro users, who love it for drawing, annotating and taking notes. We believe a finger will always be the primary way users navigate on an iPad, but we understand that some customers like to use Apple Pencil for this as well and we’ve been working on ways to better implement this while maintaining compatibility during this latest beta cycle. We will add this functionality back in the next beta of iOS 9.3.

I complained about this the day after I installed the public beta, and since then I’ve wished I could go back to iOS 9.2.

I appreciate (and have gotten used to) the complimentary functionality of the Pencil, but I look forward to reverting back to the old interaction model. Inside Notability, where I use the Pencil extensively, you must switch to the navigation tool to move the page and switch back to the pen to write your notes. Since you are switching interaction models at the software level, I’ve found it to be nothing but a nuisance to have to switch at the hardware level (if you consider my finger a piece of hardware) as well.