This exchange seemingly proves the argument that user trust gained from the EV treatment is misplaced, and that the endeavor was a farce all along. It's not as though the user's browser was distinguishing the good CAs from the bad!

I disagree. I specifically said in my original comment they were very useful for those that knew what EV certs were and EV certs weren't.

You may not know that Digicert is a quality CA who wasn't going to risk their position as a CA to sign an EV cert for a typo squatting phishing site pretending to be PayPal but there are those who do. The green UI in chrome & firefox made finding all of this information out incredibly simple and obvious.