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Depends on how you look at it. Next week Harry Potter will top the children's list and be deprived of the glory of a top spot on the regular list. A blow that will hardly damage either its reputation or profits. However, there are 14 other YA titles that now get prominent mention in relation to the NYT Bestseller list that never would have had any mention before. At the time the separate list was created the publishers of Harry Potter weren't pleased but the publishers of non-Harry Potter children's and YA titles loved it.
In one sense the argument in the article you linked is a weird loop. It says that without a spot on the list books will be deprived of success, but first they have to have had success to get on the list. It says making that list was the reason for Potter's huge success but it was already showing great success that was undoubtedly boosted even further. So the traditional NYT listing was only an aid to those books that were already, by the standards of publishing, very successful.
So it gets down to what is the purpose of the list. Is it simply a census or is it a tool for readers? If the former then it is definitely lacking. If the latter then is the tool improved by removing the obvious from the list (I really don't need the NYT to tell me that a lot of copies of Harry Potter have been sold so maybe a "not so obviously bestselling list is preferable to a tool). After it has been on the list for six years, it isn't really useful information to me (as a reader) that Bridges of Madison County is on the list.
I find it similar to the debate about the Best Animation Feature Academy Award. Yes, the creation of the category was pretty much designed to prevent another Beauty and the Beast, and when a truly great animated movie comes along it is going to suck that it is relegated to a second tier category. But on the other hand it also guarantees that animation as a form will get at least some recognition every single year.
That said, if Scholastic really wanted to get that top NYT spot all they have to do is stop classifying the book as YA. The categorization of books between the two categories is not imposed by the NYT but rather by the publishers telling the NYT what category it is in (at least that's how it was when it was first split). At least in the early years of it several authors/publishers who thought they might pull it off went this route.
The reason that Christian lit (and other niche publishing markets) tends to get underrepresented on the list is that the list is comiled by random survey of retail outlets and most Christian bookstores and no direct mail bookselling are not part of the survey. That's what indicates just how hugely popular the Left Behind series is. Despite not getting credit for most of its sale a lot of the individual titles have shown up on the list (though not necessarily as high or as long as accuracy would present).
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