John is right -one of the most common mistakes made by new users and sometimes experienced users alike, is incorrectly squashed, and screwed-up aspect ratio, of graphics, photos and text. It's one of the main things that shouts 'amateur' to a professional designer when they see this.

There are very few cases where you get acceptable results from squashing anything. It looks bad for text, photos, and most graphics look poor - in fact the example you illustrate of a squashed rounded rectangle is one of the most common errors. In the past it has been way too easy to make these mistakes.

That plus the fact that HTML does not support text aspect ratio changes.

So all in we decided we should remove the the easy ways of messing up your drawings, page, photos and HTML.

You still can however change the aspect ratio, just un-check the padlock icon on the Selector Tool Infobar and you you can stretch with the corner handles. So it's still possible, just not so easy, to stretch things.