This is a new formula but it was engineered to follow the old one in most regards. It is also intended to fix loopholes, as possible while adhering to the first principle. Most of the salary increases you are seeing are a result of training, though, with some builds becoming more expensive by design. Other builds have become cheaper, in order to offset that so the total salary mass is slightly less than what it would be. Leaving things as they are for too long led to the situation where there were obvious loopholes and the whole game was shifting to some very specific builds and strategies. It is always better to try and fix things, even if it means breaking some eggs in the process. The BB community does not like change, this is well known, but in this regard, change was needed and, in my opinion, too late even. I will give my best to explain the changes and the reasoning behind them in this Q&A, as well as what can be expected for the future.
GROUP 1 - Cap: will players cap sooner / is the cap changing?
Nowitzki (SLO NT) [forum]
1) Since the SB is costier now in terms of salary, is it going to consume more potential too? You have not touched the concern about ousting out lower potentials from mostly smaller NTs, the text is here: [link], but if this is correct, this is another step in the mentioned direction, if you ask me.
TonyC [forum] - Salary and Training Cap
If in the old world, a player generally hit their cap around $X salary, does that hold true under the new formula? If yes, does that mean that today's elite SB bigs and IS guards will be fundamentally impossible to create in the future because they would cap before they hit those builds due to the higher salary cost of those skills?
usual.suspect91 [discord]
ALSO VERY IMPORTANT, what is going on with our players CAP? We had players with 160k salary that now have 210k and they are trainees. Do you plan on changing the cap?
str77 [discord] - answered
Q: What about cap?
A: (From Discord, my answer to str77 two days ago) Cap is adjusted to emulate the same general levels as before. Since this is a new formula, there will be players that will hit the cap sooner than they would have before, and those are the exact ones that have their salaries increased comparing to what the old formula would have given them. On the bright side, basically the same amount (or slightly more) of players will hit their cap later than they would have, since their salaries decreased comparing to before.
Update since then, after reviewing data and code: The cap has been set at higher levels than before. It still stands that higher salary equals hitting the cap sooner, but since the cap is now generally set higher, most players will have more cap room.