The way I read it, they have simply renamed "starters" as "finishers", and renamed "DNF" as "doesn't get points". Not sure why they did it, but the obvious effect is that it is now easier to meet "number of finishes" requirements for things such as Runoffs qualification.

Its sort of like what happened to SARRC a few years back where the requirement for running the SIC was changed from 3 finishes to 3 starts. The given reason was to not penalize those who supported the series but had the misfortune to drop out.