I'm not sure why the NHL doesn't want to believe that goaltenders are getting better.  Go back twenty to 25 years, there were a lot more goals scored, which apparently equals more exciting hockey.  Of course, this isn't a result of the dominance of the stand-up goaltending style.  Actually, there were very few restrictions overall, less the further back you go.  That's rather ironic.  The NHL keeps reducing pad sizes for goalies, and putting more restriction on them, but goals have overall still continued their downward production trend.
So the NHL is going to reduce pad size and make goalies remove a number of superfluous flaps and such.  Removal of the unnecessary flaps makes sense.  I know that if I'm watching a hockey game, the last thing I want to see is the puck miss the net or hit a post because it just caught a piece of some loose hanging scrap.  However, keep cutting back and cutting back on the pad size, and sooner or later a puck is going to nail some unfortunate goalie in a lightly or unprotected area and seriously injure him.
Perhaps this is the subtle motivation of this change.  Yeah, that sounds like a far-fetched conspiracy theory from Coast-to-Coast.  But consider this:  Last season, the Penguins lost Marc-Andre Fleury to a high ankle sprain.  They have backup Dany Sabourin, and need another, calling up Ty Conklin from the minors.  So what happens?  Sabourin struggles, but Conklin comes in and just dominates for most of the time that Fleury is out (My first entry in this blog is actually about what the team should do when Fleury was healthy again, and includes a number of stats).  Even before the Penguins acquired him, many people believed he would be relegated to the AHL or maybe Europe until he decided to call it quits.   However, because of one freak accident, he gets a second chance, and incidentally, won himself a $250K raise on the contract he recently signed with Detroit.  Just like that, he is once again an NHL-level player.
Now, I am not about to say that this case will be typical.  This is likely a rare case.  But, with all the subpar goaltending in the league right now (Many people will likely agree that a number of teams need some serious goaltending help), if a starter goes down, and a call up performs valiantly, that call up may earn themselves a roster spot.  Heck, they might even steal the starter's job.  This would leave a team with three NHL level goaltenders, and if the team doesn't want to carry three goalies, they would have to demote one to the minors or even trade one of them, providing a dispersal of goaltending talent.
That's a pretty big reach, I know...especially considering the NHL just wants to up scoring.  However, isn't it a rather intriguing thought?
Anyway, what really surprises me is that the leader of the group that is suggesting these reductions (at least this most recent one) is former NHL goaltender Glen Healy.  I forget where I saw that, but I was rather surprised when I saw that a goaltender who played in the era of big pads, and had to deal with a number of pad reductions in his career would approve another shrink in protection for today's goalies.
Really, my problem with this is that goaltending depth really is almost non-existent in hockey today.  Teams such as the Penguins that have a great number one but only average number two would usually sink after losing that number one.  The Pens lucked out that Ty Conklin proved to be in the best form of his career in the NHL.  Another example would be the New Jersey Devils before they signed Kevin Weekes a year ago.  They were a championship caliber team, but for as long as I can remember in the Brodeur era, the backup goalie was a rotating door of young goalies that wouldn't get 15 starts in a season.   If Brodeur went down in one of these seasons, the Devils are left with a largely untested NHL goaltender.  It's like that in much of the NHL right now, though.  Many of these goalies with a fragile psyche are losing it then never recovering.  When's the last time you heard anything about Roman Cechmanek? 
The NHL needs to quit with these pad reductions, and maybe try doing something with the offensive side of the game to increase scoring.  The problem isn't that goalies have too much padding; it's that the offensive side of hockey has remained unchanged for many years.  Defensive and goaltending styles have developed continually, while offenses stopped developing and haven't started again.