To say Crawford agreed with the current direction is a big stretch, Spectral.
I put up a synopsis of the panel itself (Here), but for Jeremy's bit, it was very disrespectful to him and he spent the entire time wearing his PR-plaster smiling face, and only actually looked like he was engaging or growing animated as a person when he was talking about background druid lore. He gave "safe" answers, when offered incredibly loaded, back-handed questions, especially given that he was on a publicity panel for the game that Wizards has already endorsed, and wasn't actually given any real opportunity to speak about his actual forte (being that he is lead for rules design, his entire segment had one single, largely rhetorical question about rules that was worded and loaded in a such a way that he didn't really have much room to answer it, and nothing else).
Sometimes what was not said tells the story more than what was said. Crawford never argued against any of the changes. Yes, they were safe answers. Why was he even there if he wasn't going to answer any meaningful questions? My guess? To put credence and confidence to Swen and company; a sign of official support. Surely if WotC and Crawford aren't against what Larian is implementing, then they are okay with it. That's what I perceived. If that's not what they were hoping for, well, that's not what I got from the panel.
Perhaps personally Crawford may not like it but his personal preferences don't matter if corporate is good with what Larian is doing with the game.
WotC is part of Hasbro, which is a giant corporation. It is likely this entire panel run along a pre-agreed scenario, and that they have decided beforehand what they would speak about and what not.
I remember when HotU (the expansion to Neverwinter Nights) came out and at some point players discovered that it was supposed to have several endings. They were still left in the actual module, just blocked with a comment that it was removed on request from WotC. Frankly, I doubt WotC has a different deal with Larian now, and that they would now hesitate to interefere in game development when they didn't before.
I think it is possible that this reimaging of tabletop rules for a digital game is actually WotC's corporate strategy for this segment of products (that is computer & console gaming).
