Digging into the past
In the past, one of the frequently requested features was to be able to associate the notification profile to the device during discovery of the device. Since the profile and the criteria options were separate, we couldn't achieve this even when we knew it would add lot of value. In the old client, when we edit the Admin-->Notification profile, we wouldn't see previously selected criteria options. Only when we edit it inside the device page, you could see the selected criteria options for the device.
When API client was introduced, we combined the profile and the criteria options but when the user changes the criteria options inside the device, they also had the same profile name. ie A single profile name was having more than one criteria options. This design did not help in achieving that required feature "Automatically assign notification profile to the device during discovery" since there were more than one set of criteria option for the same profile.
So, the only option was to tie a notification profile to one set of criteria option. We introduced that in one of the consolidated API client fix patch in 11600. Those users who have made many changes in criteria options in the device level started seeing hundreds of profiles in the admin page. This was because each set(profilename-critera option) is considered as a separate profile. It was bit tough for them to manage. So we handled this differently in 12200 and it won't list hundreds of profiles in the settings page.
New Design in 12200:
1) If a global notification profile with a single set of criteria options is assigned to one or many devices, it will have only one entry under "Global profiles" after upgrade.
2)In 11600 or before, after assigning a notification profile, if the user had made changes in the criteria options of individual devices, they would be considered as separate profiles. Since that criteria option is specific to that device, it will be listed under "Device Specific profiles".
3)In 11600 or before, if the profile is edited and applied to multiple group of devices with different criteria options, each group will have a separate profile name and they will be listed under global profiles. Names can be manually changed only for these profiles by clicking "Edit Name" option.
Now using Discovery Rule Engine, users can automatically associate a notification profile to the devices during discovery.