Custom Post Type and Gallery Shortcode

(Actually using 3.9 Multisite, just to be precise!)

I have a custom post type where I would like to add a [gallery] to the post (actually behaves as a page), and therefore would rather not support a featured image.

However, I noticed when I upgraded to 3.9 that if the custom post type does not support thumbnails, then the [gallery] shortcode is disabled.

I am having trouble telling if this is a bug in 3.9 or something I’ve coded wrong in my custom post type and I can’t find any documentation to help.

I’ve tried disabling all other plugins (obviously I am working on making my plugin/custom post type work! disabling my plugin was how i figured out it was the custom post type), going back to 2014 theme (didn’t make a difference), but the only thing I can figure out is that the custom post type has to support thumbnails in order for the gallery shortcode to work.

But since I want to display a gallery on this post type, I really don’t want the featured image/thumbnail there (and I am making a big deal of this because, yes, this will completely confuse my users. they will try to do both).

I tried to use the remove_meta_box function to get rid of the Featured Image metabox from the custom post type, but that did not seem to work.

The only other thing i can think of is that I can try to put a conditional statement in my theme support / implementation of the Featured Image so that it does not actually show any featured image that is selected (still confusing but at least won’t break the page with featured image and gallery vying for real estate).

Is it supposed to be this way that in 3.9 a custom post type has to support thumbnails in order to use a gallery (or at least the gallery shortcode)?

Thanks!