Exactly, why make an effort to make people believe that Nikon would go from the D3100 (14mp) to D3200 (24mp) to D3300 (16mp).
Clearly no one would believe that Nikon or any manufacturer would make technology travel backwards from 1 year to the next.
Something that came up in a previous thread was that the D3000 had some features that were eliminated in the D3100 (the only one I can think of, off the top of my head, is support for an infrared-based remote control) and then added again in the D3200.
Look at these pictures of the D3000, D3100, and D3200 respectively, and you can see the IR sensor on the handgrip on the D3000 and D3200, but not on the D3100. On the D3000, it's just below the red trim, and on the D3200, it's somewhat farther down. On the D3100, it is completely absent.