I like the fix. May even make me attempt to find a party on Aether for it if I decide to renew my sub in the following week (I'm just returning for a month I was gifted with, to check the updates).

It doesn't excuse the lack of a normal mode, though. Sometimes I just want to do something like CLL... you still play with others in sort of a challenging way, but don't necessarily need to go all the way as hopping to a different Datacenter and outsourcing the party finder to a Discord Server. Hopefully the actual ingame PF is having a healthy amount of movement after the update. Didn't check Aether's myself, but Crystal sees almost no action.