I would say they changed that to make hits less likely, which is in my view a good thing.
That's exactly right. Shooting without spending a fast action to aim allows moving in the same round, so this is basically a move+shoot action.
The overall idea here is that we want to emphasize suppression + movement to move into a better position to take out the target as key in combat - actually hitting a target on your first shot from a long range is intended to be difficult. That said, if further testing (including by backers) indicate it's
too difficult to hit, we'll tweak it.