Hi,
Yes was had a good reason to change the location.
Thanks to it we are able to propose new features for image management, features which will really introduce with next release when the image system will be propagate everywhere.
(compression ration, crop, resize, coloration, effects...)
The old location is still used by the "product listing", "category listing" and "checkout" elements.
But you can remove some unused folders, the folder name contains the size of the images it contains. So you can remove folders for the product page image size.
Regards,