I agree. I see it clarified as:
1. Ability to restrict use to 1 time per user (of course there will always be ways to cheat this). For example you could create a single code for new users, place that code in the auto response email after a user subscriber, and that subsrciber would be limited to one time use, based on cookie, or ip or some other factor, but the lifetime use of the actual code can be set to infinite or definite number in order to be used by other new users.
You can of course do this now, but you would have to create a new separate and unique 1 time use code for every new subscriber and that takes away a lot of the automation of and is very time consuming.