Although I'm pretty sure that anyone who petitioned this already got our "official reply", I am going to post this anyway:
The data from the old shop system is no longer available, and therefor the claim command will no longer function. A determination was made that the time required to migrate the data during server merge outweighed the gain. Technical issues and the fact that a huge percentage of it belonged to inactive players were the main deciding factors.
Technical issues aside, there was also a "grace period" of over a year between the merge and when the shop system was replaced. We felt that anyone actively playing should have been able to get their things during that time, and the old shops were never intended to stay around as long time storage of old stuff.
Yes, this could all have been communicated better, and I don't know what went wrong in that department (and I doubt I ever will). We're sorry for any lost items that happened due to the communication issues. On the upside, this allows us to completely remove the old shop system, which was causing a lot of lag issues because of how it was implemented.