As a DM I think Paizo's change to Crane Wing is clumsy and ruins the Crane Style chain of feats. Whoever made the decision to change Crane Wing didn't do so in a fashion that maintained Crane Riposte as a highly useful and attractive feat as the last in the chain. The penultimate feat in a chain of feats should be useful and attractive to a player.
There is very little incentive to invest in Crane Riposte as one deflection while using Total Defense will not be competitive in a fight against enemies using full attack actions. And reducing Fighting Defensive from -2 to -1 is negligible given all the attack increases provided by spells and magic items at higher levels. Thus it ruins the best designed martial arts feat chain conceptually and mechanically.
I don't like that as a DM. I think it is unfair to players who have invested in this chain of feats and unfair to martials who already experience the "watching through the window" factor when casters unleash spells that render enemies trivial. This definitely hurts monks the worst, especially monks that chose to use a weapon.
That being said I believe this change to Crane Wing was warranted for one reason: the level you can obtain it at. It was far too easy to obtain at too low a level rendering many combats against low level martial creatures trivial. If this feat were obtained at level 10 plus like say Greater Beast Totem or Come and Get Me, it would be fine as is.
Thus I'm going to incorporate the following change to maintain the usefulness of Crane Riposte:
Add the following line to Crane Riposte:
If the attack you designate your dodge bonus to AC from Crane Wing against while fighting defensively misses, you can make an AoO against the attacker.
I'm tempted to add the following to Crane Wing:
Add your level or half your level as a Dodge bonus to AC against a single attack per round in place of deflection while fighting defensively. I'll see how useful the +4 dodge bonus to AC is before I add this modification. I think scaling might be better given the scaling of attack rolls.
If the Paizo game designers had thought more about how Crane Riposte was affected by Crane Wing, I would have had no problem with the change.
The AoO gained while dodging the attack is more integral to the imagery and concept of the style than the deflection. Dodge an attack and attack back like so many martial arts teach. And not while using the Total Defense action, which makes it appear as though you are doing nothing offensively during a fight.
This is what I'm doing to keep the integrity of the Crane Martial Style while incorporating the Crane Wing change. I like the style. I don't like seeing it made as unattractive as the change has made it.