Since I am personally responsible for all the development work in VS Web Tools, I feel I need to answer. There is always a tradeoff between shipping product and adding more features. However, multiple selection was not cut because of approaching ship date. We understood that we were losing a feature so we have been trying to obtain feedback since March 2007 when Beta 1 were out. I actually blogged about the feature loss here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikhailarkhipov/archive/2007/02/26/what-is-not-in-the-vs-orcas-web-designer-compared-to-expression-web.aspx. Perhaps I was not specific enough. Feedback that we've received at the time was not strong at all - perhaps number of customers who tried Beta 1 and Beta 2 was not significant enough. In any case - back then the loss did not seem to be painful. We also hoped that new visual CSS based tools would help with the page layout.

Now, we do want to bring the feature back. We also want to improve layout tools so you can design pages with table or CSS based layout without having to use absolute positioning (in case that is what you need multiple selection for) - if you have suggestions how would you like our tools to help you, please open bugs at Connect. Or contact me directly at mikhaila-at-microsoft-dot-com. Again - we do feel your pain and I am sorry for the feature loss.