TL;DR people read the bold paragraph.

CCP I honestly think you should discuss this change further, at more 'morning meetings' (when clearly everybody is at their mental peak for the day...). The most important posts I see here are the ones from people simply asking 'why?' when clearly the vast majority of EVE players, who you work for, by the way, are concerned and questioning this unnecessary change.

You need to do some fast and thorough damage control to explain this action. 'Sorry' and 'I forgot' are unacceptable excuses in the business world, and your player base is possibly the sharpest and most creative of all MMOs who expect the best product for the time and effort they invest in the universe you've created. If this is part of some kind of larger plan (for example, 'making every module single effect only', heaven forbid), you need to at least make us aware of that plan, for perspective, to restore the confidence of the player base. You've provided your investors with a disincentive; 'to make things simpler' and 'because we don't like it' are exactly the wrong things to say to an EVE player. They lack justification, and I'm going to slot them right up there with 'Sorry' and 'I forgot' in terms of sounding convincing. If you're doing the right thing, you don't have to apologise.

So if you are making this change with no visibility of a greater plan that you can justify is consistent and designed to go in a particular direction, what are you doing? Changes for the sake of changes? That's called wastage.

When you go to your next morning meeting, find your Balance Team quality control guy, or whoever is at the end of the production line, and tattoo 'Transparency' to his forehead. Every single change needs to be documented and made known to the customer, through patch notes, when it hits Tranquility. Every. Single. One. Even Blizzard Entertainment is capable of doing that, and thinking you can make a change to the product you provide your customer without telling them will fill your customer base with the same warm fuzzy feeling they get when they discover a secret bank fee on their savings account, guaranteed.

This post has been brewing ever since I noticed the increasing number of times a CCP employee has said 'sorry' in the forums. If you 'care more' and 'work harder' to 'establish and nurture a trust relationship with customers', you need to go back to your teams, and implement a consistent reporting procedure that ensures no-one has the right to omit information because they don't consider it important. Communication is key in business, and we need to know everything that affects what we've invested in your company.

I know these words are hard, but I gripe because I care. Behaviour like this was a fundamental cause of the Jita riots, and I don't want to see them repeated.

You ****** up. Now fix it.

As for the changes themselves, if there's no larger plan at work here, don't fix them; they aren't broken. Listen to your investors, and justify your decisions.