I really wish they had just rolled with it and allowed it to grow as a new Twitter-like product. It still is from what I can see. The majority of people I follow are people I don't know outside of G+ who share publicly or to interest-based circles.
The thing with it being a public social network is that many people want anonymity.
It's clear that from the start they wanted this platform to also serve the basis of an identity service for the rest of google, so the public aspect completely screwed them over.
