Sigh, there was a large list of issues the NASA guy talked about yesterday, and none of the websites are covering it.

This route takes a lot more launch precision. The new window is about 1 second long, so no unusual holds or issues, or you're out of the game.

Second, it collapses any sort of time to fix issues in orbit. You go straight from launch to rendezvous w/o any sort of breather in-between.

Third, it requires a little more out of the flight control system. Until recently, Soyuz didn't have much in the way of a guidance system, but now they've gone to an actual digital autopilot with real computers.

So they have not had launch/in-flight issues with Soyuz/Progress for a long time, so they figured it's not much of an issue any more.