Then why bother nerfing the armor? I mean, the faction already had the worst cost-benefit ratio for it's units by far, so why make them worse and cost more? It's consistent pattern with USF.
Only 2 axis units really benefited from this nerf. The panzer 4 and the puma. The main reason for the nerf was so that if an axis player successfully managed to sneak a panzer 4 in and dove on the jackson, he couldn't be screwed by a 10% chance to bounce his shot. As for the puma, well you don't really want to be trading fire with a puma against a jackson in general- not really a significant change here.