Even with a hard sync it'll still be a pushover due to powercreep.

But, less so, and i'm all for it. It's one of those duties that sprouts tend to either 1) hate or 2) get utterly confused by for the simple reason that it's not representative of the mode at all, and everything is rushed so hard that they're literally lost and left still trying to understand what happened when the duty is over. For the new player experience, it's actually terrible.