The thing about the changes is that they feel so ham fisted and not thought out at all. It's extremely obvious by now that the entire goal was 2 parts: Eliminate every single non-standard line including transpose -> F3P, and change how mana regen works to eliminate clunky mana regen situations and help SpS BLM.

Both of these goals are perfectly fine goals, but they chose to amputate the entire limb instead of attempting to heal the problem naturally.

If they wanted to eliminate non-standard lines, all they had to do was examine why they exist at all. If you were to increase the potencies of Blizzard III and Blizzard IV, and make doing that line the highest potency option, most all of non-standard evaporates naturally as it's no longer the best potency option. Creative players could still use non-standard lines to adjust for movement, but it would be at the cost of potency (in some situations).

To go a step further, if you want to ensure that players adhere to the standard line, make Ice phase interesting! Scrap Flare Star entirely, and instead make it so that F4s increase the potency of Blizzard III, and if you complete all F4s, B3 becomes Absolute Zero or something along those lines. Now I can get the reward for my F4s on the back end, Ice phase is more interesting, and I'm less punished for missing one or two F4s because B3 would still be higher than normal due to the scaling previously mentioned. You could even make it so that Absolute Zero buffs B4, further incentivizing planning ahead to ensure you can try and find a reasonable spot to cast those spells.