It's an important contextual piece to remind some of you who may not have been tuned in when station placement was an ongoing conversation, but Medford Hillside residents are the ones (not universally) who helped shoot down a Winthrop Street station (with the support of MassDOT) in favor of the Route 16 terminus. College Ave, Winthrop, and MVP were all stations under consideration. I'd be interested to understand how that public petition would have played out with a reassignment of the 96 back to its original routing.
One thing that the lack of a station helps with is the speed (reliability/usefullness) of the extension over distance. I know F-Line has commented some pages back on the average distance between stations and that having both MVP and Winthrop was just too close of a distribution and having no Winthrop was just too far. A future extension to Winchester will benefit from the stop spacing as is planned.
For my money, I would keep the new 96 due to its increased overall usefullness and reroute the 94 over the George St. via Winthrop, coming back to the normal route via College Ave but that's for the bus thread.