From what the commentators have been saying, the actual changes make a lot of sense - routines made up of set number of elements, each element has a degree of difficulty score and if they fluff the element, they aren't awarded the degree of difficulty which results in reduced score.
Teams that qualified for the finals in 10-12 will have had multiple base marks applied - the minimum score for an element - rather than the full degree of difficulty. This means that they can lose 7 or 8 points from their DD so whilst the difference may look dramatic, it may just represent a tidier routine.
The problem at the moment is that there is no way for the spectators to make sense of what is going on as it is just presented as a score with no visibility of which elements have been penalised. I'd like to see on screen graphics which show which elements have been fully awarded, which are under investigation and which have been failed - similar to what they now show for figure skating.