Thoughts on 1.1.3 Nightfall Changes

Patch 1.1.3, released 27-Feb-2018, made significant changes to the way Nightfall strikes work:

Hard-fail timer is gone.
All modifiers are gone. This makes sense for Timewarp modifiers, but I'm not sure why Momentum/Prism/Torrent would be removed as well. (There are indications that modifers may return eventually.)
Points are awarded for kills and generating orbs. You get full points for the first 15 minutes, half points for the next three. Your score slowly decays over time.
If you die during the boss fight, it now resets to the last checkpoint, just like a fireteam wipe in a regular strike. Your ammo and super are not restored.
Prestige Nightfall strike difficulty can be adjusted with Challenge Cards.

This is generally positive for 3-person fireteams:

Teams are rewarded for clearing enemies in a zone, rather than speed-running everything.
The removal of the fail timer means that less experienced fireteams will still be able to complete the mission.
Configurable difficulty can make Prestige runs more interesting.

I'm not happy about it for solo play:

Some advantages of cleverness are gone. For example, in Savathûn's Song, knowing that you only had to kill the two Hungering Ogres to get the door open gave you a big advantage. Figuring out these things was part of what made it interesting for me.
The pre-boss parts of the strike matter less. Getting to the boss slowly or quickly has no effect on your ability to complete the mission. Before, playing well early in the strike would give you some padding that allowed you to die once or twice on the boss.
You're more at the mercy of bad RNG during the boss fight.

On the plus side, failing during the boss fight no longer requires you to replay the entire strike. Assuming you can gather enough ammo, you can just repeat that part.

As I look over the guides I've written, I'm thinking that I can remove essentially everything before the boss fight without making them any less useful in the new system. Most of the clever time-saving tricks and fancy moves no longer matter. The lead-up to the boss fight is "kill everything", and the boss fight itself is now primarily "don't die". The new system makes soloing less interesting.

I may be getting ahead of myself, but consider Savathûn's Song without Momentum or time pressure. The entire strike can be done by sniping from cover. The hard part of the strike isn't staying alive in the boss fight; the hard part is getting to the boss fight with enough time on the clock. Everything except the Thralls will stand at long range and let you snipe them, and the Thralls were only dangerous because, if they hit you, Momentum prevented you from healing while sitting in cover. The only hard part in the entire boss fight is the last dunk, which could be dicey without Momentum healing.

As Esoterickk noted in his first 1.1.3 solo run: "My opinion on the new Nightfall changes? Ghost answers it perfectly! See 02:10 in the video."