They also added something akin to your first post, but more to the point of Kavik's post---warps to out of the way places. If you do the waypoint quests in Jueno, you can port directly to many places like Garlaige, Boyhada, Zvhal, and even Attowha now. Forget if there was one to Fei yin? It's like 25 or so in total. There's also the VoidWatch warps as well.

As for the weaponskills, they're taking a slightly different route at the moment. Making the first merit in a weaponskill something like 3x the potency, and then reducing the potency of each additional merit. So, you could unlock all of them, having them all at about the 3rd merit's potency as it is now. This may still prevent you from unlocking a few if you want to ramp up the strength of some of them though. Would be nice if they'd also consider raising the category's cap to maybe 25 or something. But, at least this may offer a little more flexibility for some. Time will tell.