Yes. Basically, you could reblog but edit the text that was being reblogged while keeping the content credit there. Often it was just used to trim a huge wall of text down to the segment you wanted on your blog or fix horrendous spelling, but then you had people that would be dicks with it.

It was very much like quoting onna forum - a quote on a forum has the original person's username attached, but since it's your post being written, you're able to edit the quoted text before you actually post. Which is useful if you're responding to only a specific section of someone's post, you can quote just that piece of it instead of their wall of text.

Basically it just didn't have enough forethought put into it.