Their reasoning was that if you want to play with Makhleb, you can join at the temple.
Personally I disagree. It's looking like the only starters are gonna be Beogh (nope, getting scrapped as a starter in place of earlier Beogh altars), TSO (nope, getting scrapped because he's not useful in the early game, only in the late game, so the solution is to add more demons/undead in the early game and reduce the number of demons/undead in the late game), Ely, Trog, Zin, Xom, Yredy, and Lugonu. That's frankly not enough. At the very least, Okie makes a good starter since you'll get access to Might at about the time ogres show up. If Trog's acceptable as a starter god, I can't imagine why Okawaru isn't. (I know Might was renamed, shut up)
Starting with an early god is like starting with spellcasting, if you want it, you want it from the start. Nobody walks into the dungeon thinking "oh, I'll learn how to cast spells when I get there!", so why do people walk in thinking "I'll start worshiping something when I get there!". I can see undecided classes, that's perfectly fine. I don't want to shoehorn anyone into worshiping a god they'll just drop as soon as they hit Temple. But if I'm gonna worship Okawaru, I might as well save myself some time and just begin with him. Giving up some early skills/items to gain a head start on piety is a very interesting decision for the player to make. Why the devteam wants to remove that, I'll never know. (For those that don't know, god wrath is going to be nerfed, especially for lower level players).
I can understand not wanting every god available at the start, and that's fine. But if the god has usefulness between D:1 and Temple, it should be a starter. Makhleb had use to at the very least DD and at most invokers actually using minor destruction to kill things. If the problem was that everyone was using Makhleb only to get HP+mana on kills, then maybe, just maybe, the problem was with Makhleb and could be fixed?