The change was (and it looks like everyone forgot this) actually only step 1 of a multi-part plan...and the other steps didn't happen. Basically, we were looking into changing it from a magazine to an anthology so that it could be sold more easily in bookstores and online bookstores like amazon.com, which doesn't sell magazines. So if it was to be an anthology, the "magazine" part from The Leading Edge Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy would have to be dropped, meaning the "the" part would have to be dropped as well, leaving Leading Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy.
The anthology route is still a viable option if current editors want to pursue it--you can keep the ISSN and get a separate ISBN for each individual issue. But this is only worth doing if someone's going to actively try to sell it into bookstores and other retailers...and TLE has never had much of a marketing department.
There may have also been something about the difficulty of updating the logo font...the old logo's letters were kind of badly proportioned, so when I edited the font to fix the proportions up nicely, there was something weird about the "The" embedded in it...something about it being an encapsulated postscript thing or something, so I couldn't fix the proportions on the "The" (the letters didn't quite line up right) and I just deleted it...I could have recreated them completely but just left them out since the name was changing anyway and it would've been a pain.
Hmm. I see on the current Leading Edge website that the OLD ugly logo is used for the main graphic, while the new nicer logo is used on the issue 49 cover. (See the N and G differences, for example.) The old logo should really be eradicated...
But yeah, the abbreviation has always been TLE even though the "The" is gone.