That does not say it was their intention to increase the align time. It may have had other reasons, such as ease of traversing through wormhole space or the effect of propulsion modules on those ships.
CCP didn’t give any reason why the combat-capable barge and exhumer should have the worst agility of them all, even though they sacrifice yield and convenience for better ship stats.
I really saw that in another light, but I guess that depends on your interpretation.
To me it seems they just forgot the effect mass has on agility, when CCP doubled the mass without accounting for agility changes.
Yes, that’s one way to look at it.
Another is that you have 3 barges:
reward (with higher yield)
convencience (with larger ore bay)
combat (with superior ship stats)
Previously the ‘yield’ barge was the one with the worst combat stats, which was fair as it had increased yield. But now it’s both the highest yield barge as well as the most agile one, while the ship meant to be better in combat has the worst agility.
Isolated to just affecting prop mods? Incredibly unlikely. It makes far more sense that they wanted them overall less mobile, if only because it happened to both the Skiff AND the Proc. Changing mass has an obvious effect, I know CCP can be dunce but even they wouldn’t go “oops did that affect align time, wow… that was unexpected” which makes it so highly unlikely I’d not even ever consider it a factor.
They had to nerf them somewhere that doesn’t negatively affect overall mining capability but isn’t inconsequential. Could you think of a better, and possibly more fitting, nerf than overall agility? Like I said, if your ship’s main design feature is “massive EHP” then it’s probably also going to be slow. That just makes sense and so they opted for that.
As said earlier, extremely unlikely.
Previously is gone. They didn’t just change a few % here and there as a minor adjustment: they shook up the whole mining meta, on purpose. Same when they shake up meta or bonuses on other ships: “but you used to”, yeah and now you can’t. One may not like what they are doing but that doesn’t change the fact that what they have been doing here makes reasonable sense.
“If you want maxed EHP we’re not going to cut your mining (because that was not the intention of this update) but we do want to nerf you somewhere that’s consequential and doing it in your agility and speed IS consequential and makes the most sense as it’s in line with high ehp = slow, so we went with that route”.
If you look at all the changes they made from a neutral perspective you can very easily see what their ideas are and where they want things to go: a very different mining landscape. Your “I see it differently” doesn’t really hold up to what the changes ended up doing and kinda reads like copium.