Why are prim params now restricted to one prim at a time modification?

This decision does not make any apparent sense to me, and it's a great nuisance to builders who will be working on large-scale builds that actually require materials settings, phantom, etc. Having to select a prim, set its parameters, then move onto the next, is highly obnoxious; Rather than being able to just shift-select all the prims I want "metal", "stone", "rubber", or whatever, and then group-change them, I now have to go through a build one prim at a time. This has led to me now building with a literal 'palette' of prims set to different material types to avoid having the headache of manually setting each one. Why, why, why?

This sounds like a bug--because like yourself, I do recall changing certain parameters on multiple selected prims at once. Some of them didn't actually work, e.g. Hollow, so those are properly grayed out today. But this sounds different. I'd recommend sending a bug report inworld from HELP menu so our Quality Assurance can check it out. Thanx in advance.