After watching units shoot each other 100s of times its not that novel anymore.
People can imagine the scene happening based on the icon movement.
The main thing the icons are for is simple information transfer.
We need to get as much information about the battlefield with a single glance as possible.
With your simple icons nobody knows what they're up against unless they zoom in.
Just imagine having to constantly zoom in on each new unit to make sure you know what you're up against. shiver..
This could be nice for casual gameplay where you can be zoomed in to witness the glory of battle.
But in competitive gameplay it would be awfull.
The strategic zoom is one of, if not the biggest, strength of SupCom. Removing it or reducing it to what you made, would make the game half as good as it is now. In my opinion.
They call it "icon wars". They like the be zoomed into the battles. TA has a megamap with minimal overview information which is what I did to the icons in my mod. 
The idea is to not play the game of icon wars and bring it back to the way TA played. supcome battles close up were kinda lame compared to TA, units didn't feel grounded, they felt holographic and floaty. with my changes I ground the units, making them feel a little more.... grizzly... I guess. No one wants to see the clash of hundreds of tiny floaty hologram tanks, so I make them not look floaty, holographic and increase the sizes, they suddenly feel tough. I wanna see *that* clash, hundreds of *those* tanks fighting is interesting. 
