Understood.
I think increasing the deductions for mistakes AND downgrading base values is quite an unnecessary move. Really going to hurt the sport's development.
Are talking in general or about quads specifically?
If the potential positive GOEs are also increased, then the scoring potential of successful quads remains high. But unsuccessful quads will no longer be able to outweigh stronger skating/triple jumps/spins and steps/other program components just by rotating 4 times in the air.
I have said too many times that skating needs to decide what it wants to be. Sport or art, predominantly. Yes it's both but one has to be the priority. For all Olympic sports, it's 'sport'.
Another question is whether the sport of figure skating is about what the blades do on the ice or about what the body does in the air. I'm not sure the ISU is specifically thinking in these terms, but there is a case to be made in favor of a scale of values and other rules that place more emphasis on Skating Skills and Transitions as technical content/quality, and on takeoff and landing edges and other blade-to-ice skills connected with the jumps and throughout the step sequences, while decreasing (at least relatively), the value of what happens with no blade on the ice.
It may be more "sporty" to reward rotation in the air more than any other skills, and certainly more evident to casual viewers, but is it appropriate true to the essence of figure skating technique, of what makes figure skating figure skating?
To the extent that technical quality assessed by human eyeballs and human brains deciding what qualifies as "good" or "very good" or "poor," yes there is subjectivity, but no more than other judged sports. You could eliminate the PE, CO, and IN components entirely, take out the music completely, and there would still be subjectivity in this sense.
Someday in the not-too-distance future it might be possible with technology to measure things like speed, ice coverage, edge depth, height and distance of jumps, etc., completely objectively. Maybe the security and quality of the edges and turns with comparable or better accuracy than the eyeballs of judges standing and squatting on the ice to assess those qualities of school figures. Would making these assessments more objective increase the sportiness?
How about quantifying the difficulty of unlisted moves and of connections into and out of and between elements so there would be a more objective standard of what constitutes a more difficult program assuming the jump content is the same? Perhaps to the level that a program full of difficult and high-quality connections and skating skill, and spins and steps, throughout, can outweigh a program with one or two more quads in place of triples and much lower quality and non-jump content. But high difficulty connecting multiple successful quads, all with high quality, would easily triumph over either.
Just wondering... Casual audiences in general are probably most interested in easily quantifiable jump content, without obvious errors, and in personalities/charisma/star quality that might or might not connect to high skill level in the more artistic components.
A subset of the lay audience is highly interested in the artistic side of skating in ways that can be appreciate by applying standards used for enjoying reality TV dance contests or other performing arts or performance-related sports, with standards more refined than the casual "I like what I like" but more focused on the whole body including facial expression and not much on what the blades are doing.
How much overlap is there between audiences who come for the big jumps and the big personalities and the risk of falls, and audiences who come for the artistry?
Can casual sports fans and casual arts fans and technical skating purists all be satisfied at once?
, but it definitely gave me a better understanding about the scoring process. 
