Assuming hand crossbows are still light, you shouldn’t need the feat to dual-wield them now with the new wording of the light property (note that it doesn’t specify that they have to be melee attacks). The Feat just allows you now to add your prof bonus to the damage of the second attack when you do so.
Ya, it seems like a lot of features which are powerful in ways that the designers likely did not intend have been nerfed.
The problem I'm talking about isn't dual wielding crossbows with the loading issues involved. It was that in the current rules you get the bonus action attack from just using a single hand crossbow with no weapon in your other hand. You then combine this hand crossbow attack (with no penalty in melee thanks to Crossbow Expert) with the Sharpshooter feat, the +2 from Archery style offsetting the -5 from Sharpshooter - and you get three really powerful (+10 damage) and not that inaccurate attacks per turn. It's easy to use, ranged, and very hard hitting.
They don't give +1 to stat because they are lv1 feats. I don't think you're ever supposed to pick them with feat picks...
