I guessed before I clicked that you might be linking to my pictures, and I was right!
I never took off the front panel, so I am not totally sure about what's on the frontside of that board. But I remember my impression at the time was they simplified the board and deleted the extra FPGA and whatever spots.
I admit that this did not then, nor does it now, make sense to me: The cost savings would be in not populating the board with components. You would not get a large cost savings from changing a board to remove FPGA pads. I think.
I'd be interested to see, anyway.
I should note that while the board said it's HW version 1.04, I had a newer version of the bootloader or whatever (1.14, if I recall) than anyone else claimed to have at the time.