Earlier quoted context omitted.
i think SMS support was part of the reason they could not do it before, since usernames would break that feature. removing SMS makes this a non-issue. the phone number is now just an arbitrary ID string which can be replaced by any other
There's no reason they couldn't have done both. Signal never used SMS as a transport. It only provided a UI to have unencrypted SMS messages alongside Signal chats. As far as Signal messenges themselves go, phone numbers always were an arbitrary ID string. Having a username that isn't a phone number would have only more clearly segregated the SMS feature from Signal chat; and the desire for that segregation is one of…
Signal is a merge of the TextSecure and RedPhone applications; back when it was still called TextSecure, it did use SMS as a transport for encrypted messages.