Why did Foursquare cross streams with Swarm?

It wasn’t too long ago that Foursquare split into two and removed the gamification elements from the original app (specifically mayorships and check-in leaderboards).

Now almost all of that has been undone with leaderboards following the re-emergence of mayorships; the only real difference is that these features are not available in the Foursquare app but, rather, the Swarm app.

So … has Swarm become Foursquare? Why bother with all the changes in the first place? One interpretation of this reversal is that it’s an acknowledgement that gamification drove Foursquare’s usage early on and that, without it, people are hard pressed to use it directly instead of competitors or services that integrate Foursquare’s location data.