Personally speaking, if I was running GD, I would not have recently expanded into "premium renewal" expired domains. The last thing you need or want is to have customers be in any way nervous or apprehensive about buying your products, and that's exactly what is happening right now.
With all this negative "premium renewal" hoopla online, it's gotten to the point where newbies are looking to bid on expired .COM domains and asking if there is a premium renewal or not. If you don't get into the premium renewal market at all, then no one is hesitating or asking questions, they're just buying and creating revenue for GD.