From the perspective of someone not using crit very much (my main IB has 0 crit), I see this change as (no adjective comes to mind)... I understand your point Morfee, as someone fully geared will be penalized by this change, and some classes more than others.
But, for someone badly geared (my RP and 3/4 of the T4 population), it levels the playing field a little bit. For example, now, with crit helm, ruin shoulders, T3 scenario staff, my crit is only 3% lower than people with full annihilator and T4 scen weapon. Before the change, it was 7% (as they could use the influence armor for an extra 2% and another 2% from scen weapon). Now, 7% isnt a big deal in and of itself. The main problem was needing to spend 45 renown points on crit to catch up, while full geared people could slot RD, CW3 and 5 points in crit instead with them renown points. Which is a HUGE deal. Per renown point costs, 7% crit has a huge value (RD + CW3).
So in the sense that Devs want to implement changes that level the playing field gearwise (per Aza's post here
viewtopic.php?f=95&t=17829), the change seems to make sense. And that xtra 3% crit is enough of a carrot to make me chase Annihilator like a zombie anyway. The big drawback, is that the scen weapon isnt as desirable as it was, especially for 1h. The procs on epic quest weapons can probably outweight a 1% crit bonus.
That being said, I think a hard cap on crit would help solve this overall problem more than gear fix. Capping it at something like 30-35% would limit the power creeping, limit/modify the necessity of having a specific crit increasing group setup (cough cough, knight !), as lots of classes could hit the cap by other means. In the same way, a fully geared sovereign person would hit the cap easily but would still not be miles ahead (for crit) of a properly geared person in annihilator + some complementary buff. This would also increase the value of crit debuff, initiative debuff, chance to be crit debuff, and + damage on target debuff (yé gimp classes/specs side-effect buff !)
My 2 cents. To consume with a grain of muscle relaxant.