I felt your headline was misleading because you have posted in the Nominet section of this forum. Your subject line states "Minds+Machines offloads registrar business to Uniregistrar and Nominet" but what is relevant with respect to Nominet is Nominet becoming BERO for MMX's gTLDs. MMX haven't offloaded any registrar business to Nominet. Unfortunately some members here won't read beyond what you post. Ian's comment of "presumably they [Nominet] are now going to start promoting these two bit extensions?" is a misunderstanding of the relationship. MMX and its registrar partners do promotion of the extensions. Nominet is simply the BERO.
Nominet's review of .uk pricing began last year, I believe, even before I joined the Board. MMX's decisions regarding their operations are completely independent from those of Nominet. This business partnership was formed much more recently. In my personal opinion it seems likely that MMX would have considered other BERO candidates, the same as it seems likely that Minds and Machines LLC would have considered other registrars besides UniRegistrar d/b/a UniRegistry to transition their DUMs to, but I haven't asked them so I don't know.
Can anyone find me a traditional registry that still offers discounts on multiple years? There may well be some but I am not aware of any offhand. If so, post in a new thread.