I mean, it's always felt like dogshit at low-level content. EW mostly fixed the issue of "so for this level range, you just use freeze, for this one, you just use F2, for this one you do B2->Freeze->F2 but you make sure you have enough for B2" and it was workable-enough, beyond that under-60 single-target was a shit-tastic RNG fiesta.
The US change had to be brought in because their fucking around with how the class's regen became tied to B4 (l. 5

. Which is to say, they had something that was clunky but worked, and they broke it to make it "easier."
As to how it plays overall, there's a reason people who actually play BLM aren't happy. The core rotation really hasn't changed much and is actually somewhat-improved by guaranteed instant F3s, but the core rotation is also boring and easy. You get punished pretty hard for ever deviating from the extremely rigid 6x F4/cycle requirement, so you now need to autistically memorize the exact positioning for every single encounter rather than having the option of transpose lines for much-improved mobility. And all so that lots of classes with greater utility, picto among them, can do more damage than you.