I'm sorry, but I really do have to agree with the others here. The verb was not only extremely useful, but practically required for certain private scenes. Otherwise, players would be forced to spend hours working on IC methods to gain access to the ability to shrink/grow (ie, wait for shrink shrooms to grow, make an extremely complicated multistep recipe as chemist, etc, etc..). And while they are working on all this unnecessary prep-work for a scene, the possibility of something happening that completely derails it only increases. Furthermore, it seems very limiting that the only IC methods for shrinking and growing should be determined by the game mechanics. I mean, what if people have a means of shrinking or growing that DOESN'T involve one of the IC methods and they don't feel like going through the effort to file a character request solely for this ONE power.
Now, I know that Scree offered to code in what sounds like a shrink box as an inventory item and that is very kind of them to offer, but really all that does is make it so that you always have to have said item on your character if you want to shrink or grow. Such a band-aid fix seems like more of a hassle than simply returning the verb considering they basically do the same thing. Plus.. Do we REALLY need ANOTHER item that we have to keep track of just to use something we all had access to originally?
Finally, I've been here for around three years and I have never once seen anyone randomly shrinking and growing in the bar exclaiming: "LOOK! I have magical shrinking and growing powers!" or anything similar to that.. Sure, I have no doubt that someone COULD do that, but I think the actual occurrence of such was rare to nonexistent. Plus, the old verb did have a VERY clear warning on it. And as far as I knew, the admins always did a good job of enforcing that warning. So really, there doesn't seem to be any reason not to return the verb in my mind.