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It's to do with "if we ever have big/good quantum computers, prime factorization is doable" and with "let's use the new shiny things".

On a related note, someone might discover some elliptic curve math tomorrow and your CPU can break all that stuff just as well...

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so with my cynic hat on, maybe a bunch of people already have that and that's why we're being moved off the hard stuff.

The NSA had the option to do something like that when they (via NIST) standardized DES.

They chose to standardize a version that's secure against attacks that only they knew at the time, shorten the key length so they can still brute-force it if they really need to, and successfully kept the attack secret until researchers at a foreign university independently discovered it decades later.

Yup, that was the older generation. The newer generation used NIST to propagate a backdoored RNG and to weaken several ECC-curves.

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