I just had a chat with the designers about these changes, and they made the following image to show the difference in Shield Charge area of effect after the change:
http://webcdn.pathofexile.com/public/chris/AoEdifference.png (the left is the old one, the right is the new). The difference is not very large! Many of the complaints in this thread pre-date the patch actually being deployed. To be honest, guys, this feels like a bit of knee-jerk reaction. Maybe I'm wrong and it's absolutely ruined now, but so far no one has convinced me of this.
Discharge was made consistent with other large AoE skills. Perhaps it does too much damage, but at least its behaviour is correct now. The problem with Discharge is CoC, which is receiving some love in 2.4.0 <3