Everyone I knew in the game thought that the bug that others couldn't interact with your gardens in your street was a feature, not a bug. People didn't worry about having things taken and many people used it to plant decorative gardens.
It is already extremely clear that street gardens are going to be the new community gardens / tree wars with multiple forum threads of hundreds of posts of people being angry at one another. It is not a hypothetical problem, people are already running around streets looking for stuff to grab. The bug fix has already caused strife in the community, and there are going to be calls for all kinds of fixes from not allowing non-friends on your streets to getting logs of who took them so you can ban them, etc. Then others will yell at those who suggest this and tell them not to put garden in their streets if they don't like the way it works - of course I won't have gardens in my street, nor will anyone else who understands how the game works, but new players and people who don't imagine that people will be trauling streets for stuff will, so they will be the ones victimized. Perhaps it would be better to shortcut all of this and just put it back to how it was.