I was a spore fanatic. In my free time, I looked up new information on spore. I can tell you, there was no indication that the old stuff was removed
Except outright announcements that they removed the water phase and that they might not even have flying creatures.
Actually in fact according to forum posts I am fishing through. They announced "No flying" early in 2008.
The only videos differing from the 2005 ones before launch, were those of the cell phase, which gave me no impression that anything was different other then the graphics, and 1 or 2 videos of the creature phase, which did not go into detail. If they showed multiple different creatures then people might have caught on, but that's probably why there was so little content before release.
Lets go with this... Here is a video two to three months before the release of Spore (It is nearly impossible to find the videos for spore now)
http://www.gamespot.com/spore/videos/spore-e3-2008-stage-show-demo-6194325/Here is one further back
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_wnoFGGyyEHowever HERE is the video. a 2006 video from IGN that proves the 2005 video false
http://ca.ign.com/videos/2006/05/10/spore-pc-games-gameplay-spore-demo-videoSo yeah, if you were "Looking up info" back then and you still were surprised that "Spore wasn't like the 2005 video at all!" you hyped yourself... since you started racking a list of removed features back in 2006