Haha ok so since I have a few minutes to put aside I'll actually give a response.
I wasn't being sarcastic, this is one of the best patch notes I've seen in a while because it does so much for gameplay.
Everyone is well aware of how utterly broken AoE's are [or were now], in PvP. The largest volume of classes in PvP were AoE specs. Mages, Cannon Bourges, the off Spear Champ and even sightly more rare AoE Knights. There is no denying it, because if you did you'd simply be representing an intellectually dishonest viewpoint. The damage being spread out among all targets is key to them not being over-powered.
Does this affect PvE? Well of course, the largest majority of Dungeons even are just clustered packs of mobs. The natural answer to that is to clump them together and AoE them down. However, AoE's getting knocked back in damage does have a benefit. It slows down the effectiveness of mass AoEing, and potentially opening up less AoE focused classes having a role in Dungeons. You have to now ask the question: Is pulling 40 mobs and AoE cleaving them down more optimal, or is perhaps pulling 4 packs of 10 and throwing out only a few AoE's and some very potent single targets to finish them off more efficient?
I personally hated the AoE meta. It restricted you to only a handful of classes, even though I was thankful that Cannons at large were finally viable and competitive, it still bothered me that classes with weapons like Guns, xBows and Wands just weren't welcome in any game mode. Now that's been fixed.
If you want a legitimate reason as to why damage potency SHOULD be spread out, I have an answer for that.
Magic AoE: are formed by focusing magic energy into a spell, the more targets you have, the more that magic has to be split up to hit all targets, ultimate reducing the potency of the spell on a single target instance, but the same total over all targets hit.
Physical AoE: Physical AoE's typically mean you're swinging a weapon and physically hitting more than one target. If you wanted to do this feasibly, then you would want to do what's known in baseball and swinging through the target, instead of swinging into it. This means you reduce speed and impact in order to preserve momentum. If you spent all your energy hitting the first target, you'd have almost nothing left when your swing continued onto the next target. So think of it as your character being smart while swinging.
Projectile AoE: Your weapons have a finite amount of ammunition they can pack into a barrel or haft when loading a weapon. They would then have to disperse the ammo over a larger area, decreasing the amount of mass a target gets hit with. Think about it, if you have a shot load of 5grams [your barrels maximum capacity without causing blowout] and hit a single target with it, they'd take a 5gram hit. But if you took that same 5gram limit, but then spread the mass across 5 targets, each target is now only taking a 1gram hit, ultimately causing less damage. Same can be said for arrows, instead of unloading many arrows into 1 target, you now have to rapidly change targets, resulting in less accurate shots, potentially hitting less vital areas and causing less trauma to the target.
But that's just triviality's..
In the long run, it opens up the option to finally choose between full AoE, balanced, or single target focus for DPS classes. All will be relatively equal in potential in a DPM comparison, and ultimately allows players to play what they want, not what the meta demands. For both PvP and PvE.
But I will say this, and take it as simple rhetoric.
The strongest Skill Power output I was ever able to find was about 435% orso on a fireball with full stacks, etc etc [SP build]
The weakest AoE's are the Spear AoE's, at around 100%-120%, but if you hit even just 10 targets with that AoE, your Damage is multiplied by each target hit, turning that 100% x 10 into 1,000%. So even the very WEAKEST AoE's can very easily overpower even the very peak output of a single target skill.
Like I said, take it as rhetoric, but once you stop thinking about the 50 seconds you lost on a run time in a Dungeon, and start thinking about the massive imbalances between AoE and single target in those modes [and PvP~] it makes more sense then you're trying to illustrate.
Then again, I'm not surprised that we had sooo many improvements to the skills and passives for a bunch of classes that we've all been requesting and it was all 100% completely ignored because of a few seconds lost in combat and everyones over-reactions to it. Mana Barriers got a CD, we were asking for that, Spears got a bump to their dodge, we asked for it. Procs for Mastery's were adjusted, something we needed and asked for. And all that you guys can focus on is a few seconds lost on a run time, or not having a 1-2-3-4-win key rotation on AoE's.
I haven't said good/great patch notes for a while, but this was a good one.