Might have been hardcodded into the game before it became clear Splatoon would become such a big success, to avoid waiting entlessy in the lobby waiting for other players. Probably also the reason why the map selection rotates every 4 hours. I do hope however that Nintendo will change this so you can choose between the ranked modes instead having to wait 4 hours for it.

Oh, and while they're at it: add them to non-ranked matches, too.

Already expected this to happen. Once you selected ranked battle there is no option. Nintendo should have mentioned they wanted tower control to be the sole mode for ranked battle for a few days. When the new maps came, most of the time the new maps are being played and only a few times I'm able to play the old map. So there must be something that Nintendo is controlling with.

Is it good? No. But hopefully they'll put all the content once they are done rotating/blocking it.

WOW! OMG! JUST FRICKIN WOW!

I can't believe I just read that. I know entitled has been thrown around lately but this is a case where it shouldn't be used. He's paid $60 for the game.

Turns out he was

I feel if you pay $60 for a game and a mode is included in a game at that price, a consumer should feel justified when they feel a developer is taking it away from them, even if it's just temporarily. If I paid a certain amount for a game and all of a sudden, that game removed a feature that was in the game when I paid for it, I can be as displeased as I want to be. I paid for it and the feature was included in the game when I paid for it. Said feature may have been one of many reasons I paid for it. It's not entitlement, it's not getting what you paid for. "Entitlement" is a word thrown around like candy nowadays and no longer holds much meaning to me.

Maybe after 4 million sold they will let people choose modes.

This changed quite some time ago.  Custom rules allows you to select a number of parameters, including speed, for regular online play.

I suspect we'll get it sooner or later in Splatoon but I'd rather be able to choose now.  So far I'm not a big fan of Tower Control, it's just too much of a cluster fuck for my liking.  So the fact that it replaces Splatzones for 24 hours at a time is a bit of a drag. Who knows, after I experiment with some different loadouts I might find I get used to it.

I hope people understand now why I and some other people thought (still think) that it was extremely shitty from Nintendo to release the game with half of its content not yet out. Any half decent review would have picked up on this, quite frankly unacceptably shitty, feature (for fucks sake Nintendo your game can support more than 2 modes at once) and called it out and possibly deducted points for it.

I'm not sure why people were surprised about this, it was pretty obviously going to happen based on the menu layout and in particular the fact that there was a "Rules" tab in the lobby. As others have mentioned, Nintendo probably didn't anticipate there would be enough interest to support more modes.

Edit: But just to be clear - nothing has been taken away from anybody, and it's just a rotation just like the maps. This was also obvious.

Options and choice has been taken away. The arguments are bogus, there no good reason why players shouldn't be allowed to choose all the modes and maps at all times. Like I've said many times before; different isn't automatically a good thing.