this is primarily only a change in location for where the data dump is accessed.
No, this is false and misleading. You are instead trying to quietly change the license of the data dump, and you disguise that change as a simple change of data host.
This is not the same as the previously agreed CC BY-SA license, which allows commercial use (e.g., in the event one needs to fork Stack Exchange if the ship sinks, as for example Yahoo! Answers did).
We usually avoid posting on Fridays, but with the data dump scheduled for the end of July, we wanted to share this information with the community as soon as possible.
No, this is also misleading. Here's the real reason: "The changes to the Data Dump were posted on Friday, because you needed to rush out the announcement so that Prashanth could brag about it at a conference [a few days later]!" [AMtwo].
with the heightened ease of receiving a dump
Once again, this is misleading. It's not heightened. It's significantly decreased, since the new way has no command line interface and it's for only 1 out of 184 network sites (which includes their corresponding metas). I've downloaded and uploaded the Stack Exchange dumps dozens of times from/to archive.org, works fine. Downloading is a one-liner:
ia download stackexchange --retries==100
Or to download all images:
ia download stack-exchange-images --retries==100
The new dump method instead requires 920 clicks (=5*184) and still doesn't even include images.