Honestly changing the starting eco is just annoying. I haven't felt the game has improved as a result of the last one. It has just been annoying that I have to relearn timings and build orders. Find something and stick with it.
It is being tweaked to better achieve the design objectives. Exactly because you didn't feel it improved over the last one in practice, and neither did the devs so it seems. But really, let's not make more fuss than we need to about 250 less energy consumption.
Yeah, they're definitely not going to change it now they've read your post. Actually, they'll do what they like if they think it's better for the game at the time of doing it.
why not keep energy consumption the same as it was and increase commander energy generation rate to what it was previously?
Build one more power gen, gg. The fact that this minor change actually has an impact though means the maps are bot big enough. I haven't played 1v1 in a month just because giant FFA maps are insanely fun (and the new performance improvements have allowed so), all because you get to play sim city with 300 factories (joking, mostly, because 1v1 maps with 2000 metal spots would be dumb.)