My thoughts....
1206/0805 devices are the only big ones that can have values printed on them.
0402 and smaller don't have any values printed on them anyway.
Pick and Place machines don't need these printed values.
Only hobbyists and micro-scale manufacturers doing tweezers by hand will be MAYBE affected by this... and it's not a big deal anyway, if they're careful and have a system in place to populate their boards.
Nobody keeps their SMD parts all in one box. Each part gets it's own storage compartment. So reading the values isn't required.
Of course, if one drops an unmarked SMD part into another compartment box, then it's going to be a pain.... but that's failure of the user's work process... why does he have open compartments for SMD parts? Each compartment should have covers and only one compartment open at any one time.