Observer powers redstone dust only to level 1

Does this mean MCPE observers will be changed to only output a signal strength of 1? (They currently output a signal strength of 15.) See this issue: MCPE-17439

Please change this back to signal strength 1. The new signal strength 15 makes observers much less unique and useful.

@transylvanian, I agree with you. While older, signal strength 1 observers could easily have their power changed to 15 with repeaters, the same cannot be done to reduce power 15 observers' strength without making a long redstone wire. This is much less compact than the aforementioned observer repeater contraption, which in turn breaks and deoptimizes the behavior of a lot of older observer contraptions.

For example, this is a clip of a sugar cane farm with old, power 1 observers. However, this is a clip of how an automated sugar cane farm works currently. As you can see, with the old observers, whenever one was activated, it only activated its own respective piston. However, now, if an observer were to activate, it would activate up to 29 pistons at once (1 just below it, and 14 extending from each side), or 58 pistons if using a double sided farm design. This would then break the 3 tall sugar cane as well as a bunch of 2 tall sugar cane.

This is a problem because the 2 tall sugar cane that are broken have age values accumulated, and when they are destroyed, valuable growing time that was accumulated through that age state is lost, reducing the efficiency of the farm. It's like if you notice a few fully grown wheat crops in your farm and hold the left mouse button while walking down the row, indiscriminately breaking fully grown crops as well as almost fully grown crops. This gets rid of valuable growing progress, reducing the efficiency of your farm.

This is just one effect that this change has had on observer contraptions, but there are surely others that exist. @grum, I would take notice of how suboptimal this change to observers is.