I believe the recent changes (removing sourced explanations, replacing them with a sentence that ridicules them, and adding a different and unsourced explanation "there was no established preference for the additive or subtractive principle", constitute a violation of WP:OR and WP:NPOV. It is clear that there is no consensus in the published literature for one explanation or another. We should say so in our article rather than presenting one of the explanations as the only accepted one when it isn't. To be clear, I think this explanation makes more sense than many of the removed ones. But "what I think makes sense" should not be our guideline for what to include here. —