Yeah highly annoying as hell when you planned your local community building plots and someone throws in a wrench like this...we want to keep our borders together between claims (we are not blocking places like Boston as some arses do, but are out in the middle of nowhere were we have set up some units and when our newest member tried to close the claim to myself he could not and then I noticed that I was stuck in two directions because my claim sits adjacent to my neighbor so my claim has no extra space outside of the walls at this point...very annoying.
There really is no need for this change from personal claims being their original distance...it was nice to be able to have fencing closed off between neighbors and the claims touching so that there was no dead spaces between claims.