hello flowerbubu and oldmiltonian,
I also feel the same way .. coz unlike before, we have sent our documents to sydney, and as mentioned on the website, if there is any documents missing, they would send it back to us rather than request for additional documents.. my only concern is even if they send back the documents to us, they would do it only via snail mail and further more, it is quite expensive to send the documents for me from India via courier (which obviously is faster than regular mail or speed post) and it would cause unnecessary delays.. from what I see, I am sure we would get an AOR only from CIO, and then they would send the documents to our concerned visa offices and from there, there would do the necessary work for MR, RPRF and PPR (again.. this is just an assumption and something I am hoping for).
Although, I did notice something on the checklist, which says we need to keep a copy of all the documents that we sent to CIO, which I again I assume is probably something we might need to do and send to the concerned visa office, mind you, all these are assumptions that I have made based on the new changes.
Whatever said and done, I just do not understand how doing any of this is going to help them reduce the processing times, from the way I look at it, it is absolutely unnecessary causing us painful and delayed processing times.. anyways .. keep pooling in ur thoughts peeps.. I hope we all get our PPR and MR soon.. Cheers