Having thought about this a bit more, I think this is only a hardening for those targeting gold or above.

Unlike US cards, there is no opportunity cost to spending on the BA Amex as it genuinely is the best option. Therefore most people can achieve 2500 points via the credit card and this can be deducted from the thresholds.

Accordingly:

• Bronze is now far easier to attain, requiring only a cheap short haul trip / hotel worth less than £500/pp. (Motivating people to give money to BA to “top off” their card earnings, I think, may be the motivation behind the credit card earning cap).
• Silver is the same or easier, depending on circumstances, as 5000 points can be earned with 2 round trips in business class at £2.5k each (the previous target was 2.1 round trips), and can be made easier with some combination of holidays.
• Gold is harder, as based on a £2.5k per flight this is now 7 round trips instead of 5. The impact to FTers is far worse since the opportunities for gamification have been dramatically reduced. Either way it will motivate business travellers who are about 5000 points short to book a BA holiday which they likely would never have done otherwise, which is arguably quite clever. Crucially this might well be an economy class flight (followed by a fancy hotel for the family).
• GGL is now astonishingly hard, although making qualification criteria much higher than the renewal criteria is pretty clever. For those who earn the renewal criteria, it firstly encourages them to massively overspend in order to initially qualify, and then makes it very painful for them to lose the status (the people on the borderline of losing status under renewal criteria will never naturally qualify again under the qualification criteria).

So while I dislike the changes, I can see there are some interesting (arguably cynical) ideas behind the setup. It’s like we’ve gone from us playing BA, to BA playing us…