I agree with you, they’ve even noted the majority of the player base build screw up their skill trees, so there’s no doubt slimming down the paragon board is also to combat this as well. Average player is lazy, just wants to get into the game and go. They don’t want to look at boards figuring things out for themselves. One of the main reasons PoE has such a low player base.
I’ve been kind of enjoying it myself on the PTR. Even if it’s only 5 boards total, the nodes themselves have moved around some. Now once I have 300 points this may be a moot point, but actually leveling to 300 paragon points will take a decent amount of time. I highly doubt the casual player base will ever reach that high during a season.