The vacation policy changes essentially represent an attempt to move from the flexible policies that you can expect in professional organizations where highly motivated and well compensated intelligent professionals work to a system that is more suited to the sorts of people that work at, say, McDonald's, a box store or some shitty regional office where the workers are fungible.

I understand your job to be very similar in its expectations to one of the larger law firms in the City, and I can tell you that the new policies are degradingly obnoxious. At my first firm, the partners said, "You get in at a reasonable time and you stay until everything that needs to get done is done. If you're under 30 billables a week talk to someone unless someone has told you that work will pick up shortly." That was it. If you can routinely leave work at 6:00 pm, or if things close down, the 9:00 am sharp requirement makes sense. However, if you end up working until 9:00 pm on a regular basis (or later, which I fully expect you do as an exempt employee, in labor standards parlance), or even end up finishing after midnight on occasion, the 9:00 am requirement is not just ridiculous, it's vindictive.

The vacation restrictions are stupid, as well. Considering that you probably have to get your vacation approved, the far smarter thing to do would be to assess on a case-by-case and person-by-person basis if any longer vacation were a problem.

Using half a vacation day for leaving before 2 pm, however, is pretty standard. Most people would concede that you're not putting in a full day if you leave that early.

The far smarter thing to do would be to simply say that work starts at 9:00 and people should make an effort to be in reasonably thereafter, with the key being "reasonably". That way, if you worked until 3:00 am to finish something you can come in at 10:00 or even a bit later. The other thing would be simply to say that vacation in excess of one day needs to get prior approval. That way, it doesn't matter if it's a day before your 2 days of personal days off for an unexpected death, for example. By saying "a week" they're just setting themselves up for acting like assholes when things like that happen.

So in other words, I agree with you completely. You're not a moron or a slacker working at some cubicle job in Dayton, Ohio. You're a smart, highly paid professional working in New York City, and you should be treated that way.