I found this excellent discussion about the changes to add/remove topics/sections. Fortunately, faculty now have a way to automatically add multiple sections at once. However, we set up course to default to a weekly format with 16 sections. Previously, faculty could easily change to a topics format with even zero sections, if that worked better for their class needs. Now, going from 16 weeks to zero topics is a HUGE pain. Even going from 16 weeks to a more standard five topics is a big pain.
This strikes me as a big issue and a bug. I see the reasoning for taking the number of topics/sections out of the course admin area (https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-57769). However, I don't think that the current remedy is suitable.
I know there are a number of trackers addressing this issue. However, I did not see an open issue to address the difficulty in adjusting the number of sections down. Granted, having to few sections is worse than having too many. However, too many sections are ugly and possibly confusing to students. Should I create a new tracker, or is there one I can vote up?