I'm really not finding that surprising at all. I've been finding the whole AP costs quite silly in Classic DOS myself. They essentially gave high available AP per turn for high cost skills, which is roughly the same as not-a-lot of AP per turn for a normalized 1AP cost leading to a specific number of actions per turn. When we think about it, that's exactly what XCOM:Enemy Unknown is doing right now ( 2012, of course ).
The main difference will be that over time, there won't be a reduction of the AP costs thanks to attributes/abilities/talents like there is now, which was making everything even more silly by the way and not very tactical. Heck, being able to chain 10 actions in a single turn was clearly making the game far, far FAR more easy than it should have been come endgame.
I have no idea why anyone would find the suggestion of reducing available AP and just giving a 1ap cost to everything is dumbing down anything. From "okay let's see, I have , huuh... ah! 18ap available, and I can ... 18-8... 10-5... okay, I can fireball here and move over there and... shit, I would have loved to launch a heal for 6 ap... let's find a closer place to go... here!" we will just go to "action 1, fireball, action 2 moving there, action 3, heal", end of story. Simpler doesn't always mean dumber.
Especially with up to 4 players making things a bit quicker will be an extremely welcome change.
Now, of course, I fully expect them to NOT give each and every weapon type a simple attack for 1ap. Of course that would be stupid and totally screw the damage-per-AP ratio. This is something being discussed on another topic and we should still not jump to silly conclusions as long as we have no idea what their plans actually are. They are game developpers, after all, that's still their job to figure things out and then ask us what we are thinking ( which they didn't with EE, resulting, imho, in a mixed bag of reactions ).
Making suggestions or debating how we view things is still perfectly okay though.
