Credit all goes to a neogaf member in this pst!!!
There's actually quite a number of changes to Yoshi than they make us think.
Sakurai made it clear that Yoshi stands up right now. I think it is a great change.
There is also an animation change for the first two attacks (the jabs). And again, the cutting through the air stuff makes it look really nice.
Rainbows!
Yoshi's eggs now has a trail of rainbows. Pretty obvious, and I think it is a cool change.
Changes to Yoshi's Back Air (GIF is slowed down to 0.5x speed during the attack)
So the change is that instead of 4 tail swipes, Yoshi now does 3. In exchange for that, the 3rd seems to be much stronger and has more knockback. I think that is a good change.
Changes to Yoshi's Down Air
This one is the hardest to notice and made me make GIFs from Brawl lol. First let's look at Brawl Yoshi's Down Air. This is a GIF of it in 1/4th speed in-game.
The numbers represent how I counted the animation. Every time Yoshi's feet are aligned during the flutter animation, it counts as 1 cycle. I put the start of the flutter kick as a cycle as well just to note that it does damage.
There are 7 cycles, however, only the first 5 seem to do damage while the last two are just there for animation purposes I guess. Which is shown in the next GIF (at 1/4th speed in-game).
You'll see the last two cycles (the second one is really small, but since it is a part of the animation, I included it as a cycle) don't do any damage.
Now let's see what how Smash 4 does it (and I'll post the Brawl one side by side, but it really isn't comparable). GIF is at 0.25x speed and obviously not in-game.
So there are only 5 cycles. The ending animation is just the legs and arms going back to normal. Not sure exactly when Yoshi can do something else. Although the GIFs aren't really in a comparable state, it can be said that the Flutter Kick is better now that the junk animation is gone.
And that is not it for Yoshi's Down Air changes. There is one more change.
In Brawl, if the opponent is on the ground and Yoshi uses its flutter kick, it did not cause the opponent to have horizontal knockback like it does at the end there. Mario gets knocked back to the right by a bit at the end.
My guess is that they changed it so that the splits that Yoshi does when landing while doing the flutter kick will cause damage and has horizontal knockback. In Brawl it did not do this and was merely a landing animation.
Further proof is the fact that I tried to mimic what happened in Smash 4 by making the first 2 cycles miss and let the next 3 cycles hit the other character, but the max number of hits that I could do was only 7 where as the Smash 4 one has 8 hits (you can tell by the red flash that appears).
NOW, the Down Air is done. That was more of an explanation than I thought I would need to explain my thought process lol.
As someone who started liking playing as Yoshi in Project M, I think all of these changes are for the better.
Essay Pro