This board was filled with people making arguments in favor of this move that sounded reasonable enough. Including yourself, I believe. So I'm not sure you can really say that there was "no rational basis" for the rumor. It's not like people were saying Kim Kardashian was about to be made CTO of Intel or something.
All I could do was make a reasonable case for why such a change,
in the unlikely event that it were to actually transpire, would not be as bad as some were making it out to be.
We've seen these "the consequences will never be the same" panics in other technology areas as well - I remember when LCDs were beginning to displace CRTs and it was going to be the deathknell of PC gaming because of the lag. Or the onset of SSDs replacing HDDs, right now we are supposed to be up to our eyeballs in dead SSDs that failed because of limited endurance, or so you'd believe if you paid attention to the fear mongers in the memory and storage forums some 3-4 yrs ago.
Getting back to BGA and Broadwell, I made no attempt to justify or rationalize why such a change would be made in the first place beyond the philosophical umbrella argument of "who are we, the non-artists, to tell the artist what color they ought to be using in their painting?" It was their innovative thinking that gave us our toys in the firstplace, we certainly didn't do it ourselves, and yet we reserve the right to second-guess their vision for our technological future? That would be a bit of self-hubris, wouldn't it?
Regardless, I posted on multiple occasions that I had zero confidence in the rumor given that it was being put forth for broadwell (versus Haswell or Skylake) and it made zero sense in that context alone. From that perspective, the rest of the discussion was one of pure Gedanken-type conversation, debate over a purely hypothetical quandary.