I have always thought that the selection of box sizes they offered was really haphazard in the first place. (I once received a Priority Mail box in a compact shoe box shape from some outfit that had contracted for PM boxes with their company logo on the outside, along with the standard blue Priority artwork and USPS logos.) I have a whole carton of the Board Game boxes in my basement, of which I think I've used precisely one, many years ago. It might have started out as a specialty box for some high-volume customer of theirs, and then morphed into a Flat Rate variant for the general public if its internal volume was something similar to their square Flat Rate Large size.
At current rates, the Large FRB is more expensive than shipping 3 pounds to Zone 1 - 8, 4 pounds to Zone 1 - 7, or 5 pounds to Zone 1 - 6. It's usually cheaper to ship board games via regular Priority Mail. This is why we can't have nice box never made sense to me. Priority packages have their own barcode (usually on either the back side or bottom flaps) to compare with the sender's label and verify that the proper postage has been paid for that particular Flat Rate package, so it would be pretty easy for the USPS to compare the number of PFRE envelopes in actual use for mailing with the number that they were shipping to customers for free, and see what must be a staggering disparity. Sooner or later the USPS was going to figure out that padded Flat Rate envelopes were probably the single most abused and wasted resource that they were giving away. The link here will go to my reply within the thread, but jumping back to the first post of that thread is worthwhile:
Check out this thread (below) from a few years back. They suddenly appeared back in the USPS store a couple months ago. Clear envelopes for customs forms were also "discontinued" with a "page not found" about 2 years ago.
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