Originally Posted by sbm12

Indeed, but the point of this move is that an equipment swap won't reassign passengers who have a seat that also exists on the new aircraft. That happened to PhillyPhlyer40 and it has happened to many others here on FT and reported many times.

Maybe I'm overly optimistic that CO is making this change because they've also figured out a way to stop reassigning passengers from seats that exist on the new aircraft. But that's my theory here.