I am not sure what the reasoning behind that would be if this were an intentional change. I could perhaps learn to live with the format change but the XP change just takes up more space on the page needlessly.
My guess (and Morrus can correct me if I am wrong) is that this alteration is not so much about the minutae of font sizes. It is probably more about system performance - to see if this template may render faster, with fewer calls to the database, than the old one.