If you want you can definitely interpret what they said as there can be a risk of this. Especially if the team they put on this game know as much about wrestling games as their Art Director gave the impression of.
They might want to hook casual gamers by making it more of a fighter than wrestling sim. That would definitely "hit different".
On the other hand, I would be extremely surprised if they did mess the controls up that way.
About controls in general, I kind of liked the old SYM controls, because I thought it was more realistic to not have to grapple all the time to do a move, since those grapple animations don't really happen that way in real life. That game had way too few move slots though.
If I got to design my own control scheme I always wanted that punches and grapple moves would be treated the same way so that missed punches etc wouldn't look so stupid. I also wanted a variant of controls where say [] was one move, X+up was one move, O+down another. I also wanted to use R1/L1 etc as modifiers so that R1+X+up could hold yet another move and so on. I also wanted total freedom to map anything in all of these slots (also irish whip etc) and also be able to set counter moves, to avoid things like having a generic gutwrench suplex or dropkick as counter for someone who never ever did one...
Then I'd have a logic section where it was possible to set how often the wrestler attempted the move in certain situations - something similar to how Fire Pro does it. Imagine the amount of time people would spend on tweaking and sharing logic for legends and current stars online.
IMO that would be a great base for a wrestling control scheme.
It'll be interesting to follow the development this year though.
