For sure, I've been impressed by the incrimental upgrades/improvements they make as a company so I see no reason to expect them to be any worse than the previously available offerings. Definitely some nice 'quality of life' changes in there, assuming the changes to feedtube/retention and the hop don't royally screw feeding up it's hard to see how it could be objectively worse... I'm sat here hoping they'll turn their eye to the AK platform now, though I'm not holding my breath!
In terms of playing around with hop components that's just the nature of the beast, and airsoft fallacies regarding 'the best length and bore barrel' certainly confuse things slightly. But it's all part of the fun, I love tinkering around... even if the end result ends up worse than where I started. It's such a simple platform to work on swapping things back is a piece of cake (Phoenix hop aside, but my experience is anecdotal at best).