Vitue effects always have capped at 20 right, anything over that was just there to apply if somehow you had a negative to a virtue in order to keep you capped at 20?
I hope the change they are doing here is a sign that virtues stats are being worked on and hopefully being made more relevant to the current game system. They need some buffing.
The change was simply made to fit with the Legendary Servers as some of those people have raised concerns that You could be Level 50 and have 20 virtue ranks unlocked and be OP. So this has nothing to do with buffing them or anything like that. Not originally anyway. It might get some work as a result and side effect of this attention but mainly it was done so people on the LS server wont have too high virtues at LvL 50.