Standardization of Cooldown Reduction Skills (why?)

This is a month and a half late, but I was taking a break when the August 8th patch hit. Did any anet representative explain why traits like the Pledge were standardized to 20% instead of their former, more interesting mechanics?

It used to be that you could take weird builds like most of the invisibility spells, and get extremely high uptime on invisibility with the Pledge, as well as good phantasm production. It wasn't oppressively good in my opinion, just really fun to play. It isn't as possible now, because the cooldown reduction was significantly nerfed with the standardization. The chaotic skill, that reduced staff cooldowns for having chaos armor was interesting, but never very good. It could have potentially been very good with the fall damage chaos trait reworked.

Please don't take this as a complaint. I'm just curious about the reasoning behind these changes.

Probably because the traits weren't functioning. Reducing the cooldown on Torch skills while stealthed is cool, but when you need the cooldown reduction, you're usually not stealthed. Same with the Staff and Chaos Armor although honestly the Staff trait was already trash due to the interval being too small and the cooldowns being too large. You could at least use the Torch for permanent invisibility (and it had awkward stacking interaction with different types of stealth, you could potentially get 4+ interval reductions every tick in PvE).

Also, I think the update to Phantasm spawns having a rider had something to do with it.

Even though those traits had more flavor, they were always either useless, or very, very powerful, more powerful than intended. Standardizing them allows Anet to know just how effective they will be, regardless of what is on your bar or how you are playing, which ultimately makes balancing the class as a whole easier.

I always figured they made those changes in the June 2015 specialization patch so they wouldn't passively stack with Alacrity. In that vein, it'd be nice if we got the standard Duelist's Discipline trait back so the cooldown functions in PvE.