There is another very significant implication from the sequenced genome of Trichoplax adhaerens:

“Our whole genome analysis supports placing the placozoans after the sponge lineage branched from other animals,” said Daniel Rokhsar, the publication’s senior author, DOE JGI’s head of Computational Genomics Program, and Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Trichoplax has had just as much time to evolve as humans, but because of its morphological simplicity, it is tempting to think of it as a surrogate for an early animal,” said Mansi Srivastava, the study’s first author, a graduate student under the direction of Rokhsar, at the Center for Integrative Genomics, U.C. Berkeley.

Earlier mitochondrial DNA studies suggested that this “mother of all metazoans,” Trichoplax, was the earliest branch, before sponges diverged, but this remains debatable—even among collaborators.

“The latest and most complex analysis again suggests that placozoans populated the oceans long before sponges evolved,” said Bernd Schierwater, director of the Institute of Animal Ecology & Cell Biology and head of the Center for Biodiversity at TiHo Hannover, Germany.

So why is such an ancient origin for the placozoans significant from the front-loading perspective? Let me simply provide a quote from another paper:

The amount of gene loss in sponges may be partly determined by the phylogenetic position of placozoans. If they are at the base of the metazoan tree (as hypothesized in Dellaporta et al. 2006), it is likely that the genome of the LCA to placozoans, sponges, and eumetazoans was markedly more complex than observed in either extant sponge or placozoan genomes, given the lack of overlap in the constituencies of specific gene families in these animals. (emphasis added)

From Larroux et al. 2008. Genesis and Expansion of Metazoan Transcription Factor Gene Classes. Molecular Biology and Evolution 25:980-996.

Thus, the sequenced genome of Trichoplax is telling us that the last common ancestor of all metazoans was more genetically complex than modern day sponges or placozoans.