Something I've seen tossed around is the idea that these changes were made in order to better balance Ninja for the new ultimate. Given that it's still absurdly strong due to the nature of it's 1-minute burst (which is now buffed by 10% instead of 5%...), what do you think of this?

I'm not sure if there's any historical precedent for large job changes being introduced right before an ultimate release. Did things like this occur before TEA, or UWU or UCOB? I know Ninja was changed drastically in the 5.1 patch, but that seemed to be more a long-overdue overhaul of how Ninja worked in order to make it ping-friendly, as opposed to changing the core of how the job worked.

Very interested to hear some other opinions on this.