It's definitely for the best, but there are a few problems.
- Low-selling audiobooks will only get 25 codes. You know how review rates, are, right? So some audiobooks will have only some 10 reviews, at least in the beginning. [Edit: it's up to 25 codes for producers with fewer than 100 sales across their catalogue. So this will affect only new audiobook producers or very low-selling authors]
- Some authors / narrators were counting with the income from codes to recover their investment. If they at least had known it in advance, they could have decided to do things differently. But then, if they had announced it there would be a wild rush to do audiobooks.
- I think the delays were just an excuse while they waited for the new system. I wish they weren't delaying so much and they had taken this decision earlier.
Now the advantages:
- Authors giving away audiobooks like candy were devaluing audiobooks. When the whole thing with those sites for "grab a code" got big started, I noticed it was harder to even get reviewers.
So it's overall a good thing, it's just sad that it got people unaware. I'm not sorry for the scammers, though. I'm glad they won't be able to profit from the system anymore.
One additional issue was that there were some listeners used to getting audio freebies. These listeners might go to Chirp, for example, for affordable audiobooks. This might affect Audible and ACX. This can be good or bad, depending on where you stand.