A new developer diary from Turbine's Allan ‘Orion’ Maki discusses Radiance in Lord of the Rings Online. He begins by saying something along the lines of "our intentions were good but it went horribly wrong". From there, Maki discusses why Radiance has been removed from the game and opens the door on the possibility that reworked Radiance will be returned to the game at some future point.

Why cut it now?

We have bandied about ways to fix the current implementation of Radiance. We thought about tying it to deeds, or to completing the epic story quests. As we moved toward free-to-play there was even talk about selling Radiance in the LOTRO Store.

At that point we resigned ourselves to pulling out Radiance. We knew it was a failure and we wanted to no longer keep it in the game. We just needed the time to get it out of the game and there were other, higher priorities as we marched toward free-to-play.

Read more here.