"At the time, their reasoning was that their legal team said it was required for the terms to be enforceable. So what changed? I'm not aware of any major legislation passing or landmark court cases involving EULAs..."

My thoughts exactly. GOA posted that they made the change due to 'player feedback'. Apparently they're trying to hush-up the 'legal' explanation from earlier, which just made no sense...

Who was going to read it each time? How would you know if anything changed? And they even encouraged you to accept without reading by removing the requirement to scroll to the bottom.

They should never have tried rationalizing it in the first place and just given us what every other MMO does.