I've submitted one 2,000 word piece to Dragon and am working on another. One advantage of the format change is that having more articles per issue makes more room for new voices to be published, which I hope to see more of!
I agree that brevity is one of the most difficult things to do well, and makes doing a short piece as effortful as one more than twice as long. Working within the shorter format requires really getting the most out of the aspects of the crunch that help tell the story of the fluff, like the descriptive text for powers. In the first one I did, I used a brainless formula of putting all my words of fluff up front as an introduction to the crunch. This time I think I'm using those words more efficiently by having them divide up and explain the meaning of each section of powers: "faction X focuses on harnessing the energies of nature," etc. As people often say, 4E plays better than it reads, so without these explanations the good ideas in a short, crunch-heavy piece may be hard to pick up.
So if my experience is any guide, we'll see the quality of the shorter articles improve as people learn to work in the small format.
