In days like these, it's hard to remember that one essential element of law is that folks be able to know, with certainty, just what the law is.
Forget the opposition to the AFCI; nothing has made the AFCI issue more confusing than the existance, within such a short time, of two distinct types of AFCI.
Compare this to the major upgrade there was a few years back on GFCI's. There was no code change; rather, the new ones were quietly introduced and the old ones no longer made. All it took was a change in the testing standard, all done somewhere behind the scenes.