A lot of the recent changes are about tuning for a longer early game, and postponing bounty hunts is a part of that. Especially with the upcoming(?) small hangars for early game interceptors and ground vehicles. A lot of that is wasted if a player can just push for pirhana's and 30mm cannons by month three. I get that a lot of people who've been sharpening their early game strats for a while are going to feel cheated by the deliberate pacing, but I can't hate it.
I've actually been looking forward to this, it's a bit too easy to just blitz your way through the early ranks just by doing every mission that comes along. This makes a lot of the early game content quickly obsolete and you may not even encounter some of it, in my current campaign I made it to boss rank before even a single fort defence battle, and I only ever saw two couriers total before they stopped spawning.