seems to me like they're just making them easier to aid in itemization for the FCOB.
Which is PRECISELY what I said about hunts before 2.4 and was pretty much proven right when 2.4 rolled around and only the S ranks were updated with poetics drops.
Until they add the next 24 man, the only real options for gearing up new or returning players for FCOB, which requires not just an iLevel minimum, but the right combination of items, is SCOB, Soldiery, Crafting, and Poetics.
Poetics is the ideal, but it's slow, with about half to three quarters of an item gained per week, while crafting is ludicrously expensive (an ideally melded HQ piece costing somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 million gil, and that's if you're VERY luck with melds). Soldiery is the fastest way but not all the stats are ideal, which leads SCOB.
In short, in order to facilitate people actually being able to ATTEMPT t9 and FCOB, they made SCOB easier.
Why is anyone surprised? They've done this before, but with BCOB there wasn't as much TO make easier since it was basically a couple DPS checks and an add fest before twintania. Who people still complain about being too hard.