When I said there may be stability benefits to not dividing, that wasn't because we were creating too small a number to represent. Unless you have numbers with large negative exponents, dividing by a power of two is lossless, as far as I understand (but am far from an expert). Dividing, or multiplying, by some other number may be lossy, so this change is not beneficial (except that by keeping the old functionality the tests don't need fixing)