Do non-member functions improve encapsulation in D?

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 21 April 2014 at 14:10:08 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> You may recall that I am a big proponent of explicit properties 
> because I think the ways of calling functions have strong 
> implications to the reader, regardless of the functions. This 
> is the same thing. I look at foo(x) much differently than 
> x.foo().

I agree. What was the reasoning by conflating the two?

I only see disadvantages:
- harder to read
- reduced namespace
- possibility of breaking application code when adding members to 
libraries?